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Grendel's Laundry List: Readings for Monday August 4
“All history affords us the spectacle of striving nations and groups finally torn asunder because they were designed for, or tempted into, controversy. Others fell apart because of sheer self-righteousness while trying to enforce upon the rest of mankind some millennium of their own specification. In our own times, we have seen millions die in political and economic wars often spurred by religious and racial difference. We live in the imminent possibility of a fresh holocaust to determine how men shall be governed, and how the products of nature and toil shall be divided among them.”
from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, published by the AA Service Board
"All thinking is metaphorical, except mathematical thinking. Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper metaphorical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values you don't know the metaphor in its strengths and weaknesses. You don't know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history... All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don't know when it is going."
Robert Frost
“Most people think that shadows follow, precede, or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses, and memories.”
Elie Wiesel
“Paranoia is just a kind of awareness, and awarness is just a form of love.”
Charles Manson
“Purity does not lie in separation from but in deeper penetration into the universe.”
Teilhard de Chardin
“I sometimes wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.”
Graham Greene
“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.”
Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
”Melancholy is certainly a much more satisfactory word than depression. Melancholy is what you feel when you have experienced the truth of life, depressed is what you get when you can't face the truth. Melancholy is not debilitating. It impels and informs the act of creation. Out of great sadness melancholic imagination creates great mercies, and gives grace.”
Dr. Omed
“The morning is graying with an unwritten poem. An attack of perhaps.”
Gabriel Preil
“I am sparing no effort, I am preparing my next mistake.”
Bertold Brecht as quoted by Peter Horn
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