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Quote by Iain Reid

“Pretty much all memory is fiction and heavily edited. [...] A memory is its own thing each time it's recalled. It's not absolute. Stories based on actual events often share more with fiction than fact. Both fictions and memories are recalled and retold. They're both forms of stories. Stories are the way we learn. Stories are how we understand each other. But reality happens only once. [...] Every story is made up. Even the real ones. [...] That's the thing. Part of everything will always be forgettable. No matter how good or remarkable it is. It literally has to be. To be.”

Quote by Iain Reid

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I'm Thinking of Ending Things

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Iain Reid

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“Tim Kasser: ‘The heyday of humanistic psychology was in the 1960s and 1970s, when Keynes dominated. But since the rise of neo-liberalism from the 1980s, we’ve seen an influx of cognitive behavioural approaches and psychiatric drugs – technologies that put the cause of the problem right between your ears. The therapies our governments now want all focus on internal not external reform. They don’t see suffering as a call to change external circumstances for the good of our development.”

“They say that if you really love, you never want any harm to befall your beloved. While this may be true of “normal” love, I here attest that, in unrequited love, the case is quite the opposite. One begins to associate suffering with loving and, therefore, you begin to believe that the former begets the latter. If I can make him suffer, I can make him understand that he loves me.”

“There is a tendency to speak about your suffering and difficulties so that you can draw more people to support you in order to fight the other side. That is a big temptation. You think if you are strong and you will have more support, the other side will have to withdraw. That is the hope of many people. But we know that activities based on that kind of thinking have gone on for many years without bearing any fruit at all.”

“Now, the range of our possible sufferings is determined by the largeness and nobility of our aims. It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows by the cultivation of an insignificant life. Indeed, if it be a man’s ambition to avoid the troubles of life, the recipe is perfectly simple — let him shed his ambitions in every direction, let him cut the wings of every soaring purpose, and let him assiduously cultivate a little life, with the fewest correspondences and relations.”