“How willingly we will put up with unpleasantness if commanded to by the magic words ‘doctor’s orders.’ The doctors says you’ve got to take this nasty medicine, and you’ll do it. The doctor tells you you have to start sleeping hanging upside down like a bat. You’ll feel silly, but soon enough you’ll get to dangling because you think it will make you better. On the other hand, when it comes to external events, we fight like hell if anything happens contrary to our plans. But what if a doctor had prescribed this exact thing as part of our treatment? What if this was as good for us as medicine?”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 328)
“That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
Jeanette Winterson, via Between Two Kingdoms (Page 107)
“I’d always imagined myself as the kind of writer who would help other people tell their stories, but increasingly I found myself gravitating toward the first person. Illness had turned my gaze inward.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 107)
“People often respond to the news of tragedy with ‘words fail,’ but words did not fail me that day, or the next, or thereafter—they poured out of me, first cautiously, then exuberantly, my mind awakening as if from a long slumber, thoughts tumbling out faster than my pen could keep up.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 106)
“Something happened that we wish had not. Which of these is easiest to change: our opinion or the event that is past? The answer is obvious. Accept what happened and change your wish that it had not happened. Stoicism calls this the ‘art of acquiescence’—to accept rather than fight every little thing.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 326)
“The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
“So long as you’re struggling, quarreling, there can’t be despair. Despair is one of the supreme sins, because a despairing person ceases to struggle. That makes despair the ultimate defeat; it is death. It has a feeling of completeness to it, closely connected to smugness: the despairing person makes no attempt to move from the point he is at—no attempt to change himself or the world—and this completeness is a mark of dying. Dying is completion.”
Adin Steinsaltz, via Sunbeams (Page 142)
“Using another as a means of satisfaction and security is not love. Love is never security; love is a state in which there is no desire to be secure; it is a state of vulnerability.”
J. Krishnamurti, via Sunbeams (Page 142)
“Suffering can make you selfish, turn you cruel. It can make you feel like there is nothing but you and your anger, the crackle of exam table paper beneath bruised limbs, the way your heart pounds into your mouth when the doctor enters the room with the latest biopsy results.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 100)