Iron Rule of Tomassi # 2
Never, under pain of death, honestly or dishonestly reveal the number of women you’ve slept with or explain any detail of your sexual.
Sayfa 311Kitabı okudu
Life—even with its inevitable trauma, pain, grief, misery, and death—is a gift. A gift we sabotage when we imprison ourselves in our fears of punishment, failure, and abandonment; in our need for approval; in shame and blame; in superiority and inferiority; in our need for power and control. To celebrate the gift of life is to find the gift in everything that happens, even the parts that are difficult, that we’re not sure we can survive. To celebrate life, period. To live with joy, love, and passion.
Sayfa 144
The desire to connect with the source of your being manifests in diverse moods of human existence, through performance and solitude, through pain and grief, and love and longing, with a chain never ending, with a goal never compelling, with a thirst never quenched by what is revealed with each barrier torn apart. for each realm unlocks another unknown and unseen and a veil thicker yet again appearing before you.
Poena “penalty,” for instance, which is found in the Laws of the Twelve Tables, a Roman legal code from the archaic period, was borrowed from the Greek. In time it developed an additional sense, “pain,” and both these senses are preserved in the Romance languages as well as English (Spanish, Italian pena , French peine , English penalty and pain ); the related verb punire “to punish” has also durvived.
"He never let pain destroy his spirit,
he chose to find meaning his suffering,
and eventually found peace."
And then, one day, she stopped. Slowly, painfully, step by small step, her contempt for suffering began to restore her to life. She would not allow her love for Leo to be a tragedy, and to become a scar on her soul, she told herself angrily. She would not let pain win its one permanent victory: to make her forget her conviction that joy is the meaning of human existence. “Life is ahead,” she told herself ferociously. She stopped questioning his friends about him, she stopped seeking him out—she tried to stop thinking about him. But in 1961, in her middle years, at the height of her powers and strength, when it seemed as if the whole world were spread out before her, offering her everything she had ever dreamed of, she said, with an almost childlike wistfulness, “I am not indifferent to Leo, to this day.” Then she added softly, “But you see, it was fortunate that he didn’t ask me to marry him. I would have said yes, I would have stayed in Russia—and I would have died there.”
Sayfa 49
