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And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

Anton Chekhov 

Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.

Natalie Goldberg

Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.

Haruki Murakami (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World)

I’m just dying to say, “Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?” or “Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?” But you can’t say that at a cocktail party.

Paul Gilmartin, The Mental Illness Happy Hour

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

Andre Dubus

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

Tennessee Williams

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

I bought plum blossoms
more for the name
than for the color;
I buy lipstick that way, too.
In other words,
if it sounds like a poem,
I’ll take it.

Dorothea Grossman, “Untitled”

I think people feel like that being a loner makes them “deep” or “wise” and beyond everyone else’s comprehension. Though, we are certainly not saying people who prefer solitude are lesser in any sense, just that media/literature has twisted the idea of “the loner.” Being a loner indicates you possess a certain characteristics which make a person less disposed to social interaction and tend toward the introvert side of the personality spectrum. So this sense of superiority which manifesting itself in these characters we read and these individuals we see in school and on tumblr is not part of this “loner” idea; to be psychologically healthy means accepting you have those thoughts but not letting it cripple how you live day-to-day. We cannot romanticize those who struggle to make relationships. We cannot compare people who are more isolated to people who are more extroverted and consider one better than the other.

You aren’t the only one who’s thinking about the “deeper meaning things of life.” Just because I don’t read the same books as you, listen to the same music as you, and act reserved and stoic as you does NOT mean I am incapable of holding an intelligent conversation. I can like pop music or alternative music or classical music, I can watch whatever TV show I want, I can be athletic or be artistic or be an academic, and that won’t matter at all, because I am still equally capable at participating in an engaging discussion. But if you want to discuss anything with me, get off your high horse first. And then we’ll talk.

YA Novels and Elitism 

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed 

“I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.” —Saul Leiter