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Quote by Callie Byrnes

“Everything works out eventually,” my friend told me. “It gets better.” But I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what there is to work out. I can’t fix a problem I can’t identify, I can’t hope for something I can’t visualize, and I can’t make myself happy when all I know how to be is sad.”

Quote by Callie Byrnes

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Callie Byrnes

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“I sometimes think the entire human species is just a fucked-up tapestry woven out of little particles of prolonged sadness, living next to one another in sustained dissonance, reacting to each other and to the bitter truths of the Universe, replicating themselves and their sorrow on and on and on, with no end in sight save for the virus that finally wipes us and our grotesque dysfunction from the surface of the planet once and for all.”

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Book:Elsewhere and Otherwise: Essays
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“Splendora cried, often times, bout things and people for no reason anybody else could see. Her nerves, or her brain, seem to "feel" things bout everything round her. Sensitive, I blive they call it, cordin to the new words I learn from my lame son who paints. She "sensed" things. Thought most everybody was sad. We laughed at her then, but as I grow older I begin to think she is right. She said even things like curtains, trees, some animals, looked sad to her. I looked this word up with my son, vulnerable. That's what she thought. People, too, even when they be laughin, she said.”

FeelingsSadnessVulnerabilitySensitivity
Book:The Matter Is Life
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“If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”

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Book:Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
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