If only my life could be more like the movies. I want an angel to swoop down like he does to Jimmy Stewart... in It's a Wonderful Life and talk me out of suicide. I've always waited for that one moment of truth to set me free... and change my life forever. But he won't come. It doesn't happen that way. All the drugs, all the therapy... the fights, anger, guilt, Rafe, suicidal thoughts. All of that was part of some slow recovery process. The same way I went down, I came back up... gradually, and then suddenly.
How barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.
— Finally, I found you. Dear my monster of the caves. I've finally fallen for a man. Now I feel like I've always loved him. It's what I was missing.
<...>
— My dear Ana, It saddens me to see you like this. But that's part of the risk of leaving home. I think that these misfortunes... will help you know how to live. That's what it's about: knowing how to live to know how to die.
What matters is not what is being done of us, but what we do ourselves with what has been done of us.
Original (French):
L’important n’est pas ce qu’on fait de nous mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu’on a fait de nous.
Explanation:
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952), p. 55
We learn [such literature] not for life but for classtime.
Non vitae sed scholae discimus.
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