Scars may heal, but the wound itself does not.
Scars may heal, but the wound itself does not.
― Atrona Grizel
I am conscious of every passing second. Independent of actions, emotions, and thoughts, I observe the transition of each hour. People walk. Board vehicles. Work. Speak. Laugh. I, however, watch them all from a measured distance, because while all this unfolds, I cannot ignore the time flowing past. It hurts, because all of this is clearly mere instruments of distraction. Civilization is built from top to bottom upon superfluity, and most people live not to use time, but merely to expend and exhaust it.
― Atrona Grizel
I can endure any kind of suffering—loneliness, exclusion, physical violence, or psychological torment. But I cannot endure ignorance, and this is what pains me most, because it is also the shallowest form of suffering among them. I would lose my mind not in solitary confinement, but in the land of monkeys—and the country I was born into seems like a heaven for that.
― Atrona Grizel
Among people, the degree to which one suppresses oneself is directly proportional to the breadth of one’s inner world, because most people cannot restrain what is already too small to overflow.
― Atrona Grizel
Those who live a prison-like life—whether in the literal sense, confined within a cell, or in the abstract sense, imprisoned by routine and monotony—share something with farmers and peasants: a simple life. Just as the happiness of farmers and peasants may consist merely in having their stomachs full that day, in not being greedy, and in being able to feel content despite fatigue through warm human bonds, so too a person living in such a prison is reduced to a similar condition and begins to take pleasure in mere existence. Freedom intensifies desire, yet the impoverished strata of people are not free. Nor are they wise, for precisely because they lack resources and time, they rarely find the opportunity to read and think. What renders them so calm is the narrowness of their imagination—and, for the same reason, their simple acceptance of that narrowness as it is. Modern people trapped in a boring cycle are similar, but with one difference: in their case, it is not the narrowness of imagination but, at most, the narrowness of desire. That is, they know the possibilities, yet they simply cease to want them, because they become focused solely on survival and come to desire nothing else, even if they are still capable of thinking of them.
― Atrona Grizel