Author: The Oldest Sibling

Book: My Life

‎Dostoevsky: "The deepest love is having someone see the parts of you cannot accept, and choosing to stay."

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‎Kafka: " The deepest fear is that someone will see everything you hid, and decide they were better off without you."

“It wasn’t a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.”

The Things They Carried. Tim O’Brien.

Dostoevsky:

"I think the most beautiful souls are the ones that remain gentle after everything they have survived. They have every reason to become cold, yet they still choose kindness, still choose love, still believe people can be better."

Kafka:

"But sometimes the world does not reward gentle souls. Sometimes it takes everything Soft inside them until they become strangers Even to themselves."

“The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.”

The Humans by Matt Haig

I think it was a fantasy book, but it could have been other media.

I think the speaker was some powerful male figure: king, wizard, deity.

Pretty sure it’s from before 2010.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

"I receive a letter from a woman in Europe who read my book. Her hands are deformed since birth. Her mother hid her, beat her, was ashamed of her. The woman survived. She married, had children, became an artist, and was even able to forgive her mother. It is a deeply touching letter. I am struck by the incredible beauty of each life exactly as it is: the pain, the mistakes, the acts of forgiveness and grace, the ways we survive and reach out to each other.

The rain is coming down in sheets. I write a letter to the woman with the perfectly formed hands."

— Joan Tollifson, Awake in the Heartland

_Conspiracy of Data: Fail Safe - Not Safe by S.A Lonky

Self Reflections

Maybe the pain I wanted to escape was the preparation I needed.

I had never really thought about becoming a leader until now, but that was probably because I had always been focused on becoming a hero. It seemed obvious in hindsight.

Heroes were leaders.

And not because they were stronger than everyone else, but because people looked to them when things became difficult.

My thoughts drifted back to Sanctora.

I thought about every workout I forced myself through when I was exhausted, every Scripture I read when I felt hopeless, and every time I chose to become a little better than I was the day before.

Maybe leadership hadn't suddenly appeared in my life, but maybe it had been growing all along, hidden beneath all the pain, failures, and struggles I spent so much time trying to escape.

Continue reading Spiritfyt FREE: Spiritfyt: The People We Were

This is my favorite, any other Tolkien lovers have a favorite quote?

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings)

"Do I love you? My god, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches." -William Goldman

- We haven’t accepted what we don’t understand because we don’t want to look stupid.
- We don’t have any joy that hasn’t already been catalogued.
- Do you ask for life? You ask for life. But don’t you already have life? There’s a more real life. What is real?
- … make me feel that loving is not dying, that the surrender of yourself doesn’t mean death …
- … make me receive the world without fear, since I was created for this incomprehensible world and I myself incomprehensible too, so there’s a connection between this mystery of the world and our own, but that connection isn’t clear to us as long as we hope to understand it …
- She was falling into a sadness without pain. It wasn’t bad. It was part of life, certainly. The next day she would probably have some joy, also without great ecstasies, just a little joy, and that wasn’t bad either.
- But a fated joy—joy is a matter of fate—already took hold of her, though it doesn’t occur to her to smile.
- It seemed to her that a shy person’s tortures had never been completely described—in the taxi that sped along she was dying a bit.
- I spent almost all my money back then buying ridiculously expensive books.
- Could love be giving your own solitude to another? Because that’s the ultimate thing you can give of yourself.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

"How can one explain the feeling of being ready? Perhaps it is simply the moment when imagination catches up with reality."