The Battles I Avoided

Frank Hovat

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I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

~ Fernando Pessoa

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Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they’re either triumphants or failures.

~ Emil Cioran

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Because the dream never tells you what you know already. It always points to something you don’t know, a blind spot. It’s like trying to see your own back… That’s why sometimes even if the dream tells you obvious things, you can’t see them. You need another person to tell you and then you think, “O Lord, naturally, that’s it.”

~ Lewis Lafontaine

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You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can’t separate me from the person you’ve imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it’s being in delusion.

~ Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (1919)

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Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is…