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Forever Young
When you study your emotional reactions and rote behaviors, it is then that you see that you are always running scared. You are not taught this in any school. It is up to you to study yourself…
You are cowardly because you already SEE that other people are just like you. Fake smiles, fake words, fake life.
The one who sees this IS the True Self!
— Vicki Woodyard
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Over a period of twenty-two years “you’re bound” only to get older, barring nasty surprises. This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career — something to work at, work on, “make an effort” for and subject to an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interests not of attaining grace but of improving one’s “relationships” — is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited entirely by adolescents.”
— Joan Didion, “Letter from ‘Manhattan’”
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“The world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with each other. It is a huge gang battle, using well meaning lawyers and policemen and clergymen as their front, controlling papers, means of communication, and enrolling everybody in their armies.”
— Thomas Merton
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