These worried shoes

There’s no solution to life except to live it.

But she has practised double vision before, and she knows that holding two contradictory views is like looking out of two eyes: the only way to achieve depth.

For a moment she felt utterly dislocated. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.

We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes (… the look of the public)… The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes… (the tireless hosts of cocktail parties)… Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of the people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the lights will go out in the room of their lives. And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.

(The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body).

His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance he was indomitable.

You cannot step twice into the same river.

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.

The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
will have been our life.

There is always a risk in being alive, and if you are more alive, there is more risk.