Kiyoaki drew comfort from the peace of mind that comes with loss. In his heart, he always preferred the actuality of loss to the fear of it.
He had lost Satoko. And with that he was content. For by now he had learned how to quiet even his subsequent resentment. Every show of feeling was now governed with a marvelous economy. If a candle has burned brilliantly but now stands alone in the dark with its flame extinguished, it need no longer fear that its substance will dissolve into hot wax. For the first time in his life, Kiyoaki came to realize the healing powers of solitude.

Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.
The revolution must be taking place somewhere, but the old morality persists unchanged in the world around us and lies athwart our way. However much the waves on the surface of the sea may rage, the water on the bottom, far from experiencing a revolution, lies motionless, awake but feigning sleep.

Most of us are not directly responsible for strip mining and extractive agriculture and other forms of environmental abuse. But we are guilty nonetheless, for we connive in them by our ignorance. We are ignorantly dependent on them. We do not know enough about them; we do not have a particular enough sense of their danger. Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way - we don’t know how to produce any kind in any way. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understand how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient and economical and a scientific miracle. I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced.

Imagine an ancient city that built a high wall to protect it from the wild torrents of an adjacent river. Centuries later, though the river had long dried up, the city still invested considerable resources in maintaining that wall.

"Yes, eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unloved life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever."
....
"So, as I understand it, eternal recurrence promises a form of immortality?"
"No!" Nietzsche was vehement. "I teach that life should never be modified, or squelched, because the promise of some other kind of life in the future. What is immortal is this life, this moment. There is no afterlife, no goal toward which this life points, no apocalyptic tribunal or judgement. This moment exists forever, and you, alone, are your only audience."

The wedding-ring on her finger had authorized her to become acquainted with pleasure; her senses had grown demanding; at thirty-five, in the prime of her life, she was no longer allowed to satisfy them. She went on sleeping beside the man whom she loved, and who almost never made love to her any more: she hoped, she waited and she pined, in vain.

"But surely" - and Nietzsche shook his clenched fists - "you must realize that there is no reality to any of your preoccupations! Your vision of Bertha, the halo of attraction and love that surround her - these don't really exist. These poor phantasms are not part of nominal reality. All seeing is relative, and so is all knowing. We invent what we experience. And what we have invented, we can destroy."
Breuer opened his mouth to protest that this was exactly the kind of exhortation that was pointless, but Nietzsche plunged on.
"Let me make it clearer, Josef. I have a friend - had one - Paul Ree, a philosopher. We both belive that God is dead. He concludes that a life without God is meaningless, and so great is his distress that he flirts with suicide: for convenience, he wears at all time a vial of poison around his neck. For me, however, godlessness is an occasion for rejoicing. I exalt in my freedom. I say to myself, `What would there be to create if gods existed?´ You see what I mean? The same situation, the same sense data - but two realities!"

A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

Men jeg kunne teksten enda det ikke var noen som sang den, sa Inga. Og dette står det i den: Hele mitt jeg er oppfylt av din ensomhet.
Jeg tidde. Det var selvfølgelig det som var feilen: at jeg tidde. Men det låste seg for meg. Jeg kunne ikke for det.

He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’

And Nora felt similarly, in that moment. Although she had only been left alone for an hour at this point, she had never experienced this level of solitude before, amid such unpopulated nature.

She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wilderness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.

That was what stayed with me. Being right wasn’t enough. The rules turned the right thing into a crime. The rules legitimized the desecration of the forest and took away two years of my uncles life. I learned that justice isn’t something you can count on. If you don’t do anything to change the world, it is going to keep running along the same old tracks. If you want a different outcome, you need justice to roll along different tracks. I took inspiration from a half victory.
I also took inspiration from half a loss. The bravest, strongest man I knew wasn’t quite strong enough. Alec was a warrior. He saved half a forest. I wanted to save the whole thing.

Is there intelligence? my son asked. Is anything aware?
I told him no. Nothing on Stasis needed to remember much or predict much further out than now. In such steadiness, there was no great call to adjust or improvise or second-guess or model much of anything.
He thought about that. Trouble is what creates intelligence?
I said yes. Crisis and change and upheaval.
His voice turned sad and wondrous. Then we’ll never find anyone smarter than us.

Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out that it was the former that had condemned me. His response was that it hadn't washed away my sin for all that. I told him that I didn't know what a sin was. All they had told me was that I was guilty. I was guilty, I was paying for it, and nothing more could be asked of me.

En dag kan godt tenkes å komme
hvor du ser i ditt eget speil.
Og innen den dagen er omme
har du sett at noe er feil.

Så ser du på dine mennesker:
Marionetter, tenker du skremt.
Du løper tilbake til speilet,
men bildet av deg, det er glemt...

He'd had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being "depressed", and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.
It was therefore all the more important now to resist depression - to fight it with the truth.

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one love first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.