Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved.

— Synecdoche, New York (2008) Written and Directed by Charlie Kaufman

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

— William Blake, A Poison Tree

My life is full of convenience. It is full of transaction, at its best a mutually beneficial exchange of value, a kind of arm’s-length benign use of one another for our own ends. But it is not full of contemplation. It is often efficient. But it is lonely.

— Andy Crouch, The Life We're Looking For

There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.

— Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss)

It takes a lot for me to get angry. Most of my friends can probably tell you the number of times I've actually gotten mad at them. It's rare, and for some of them, I haven't yet. This blog is different than probably anything I've ever written. I usually start with some witty quote from a book or article that I've read that strikes a chord in my soul. This week, though, I am going pretty stream of consciousness because I am angry and do not want to mince words.

And why is it so important to act strong? I have been graced with the strength to endure. But I have been assaulted, and in the assault wounded, grievously wounded. Am I to pretend otherwise? Wounds are ugly, I know. They repel. But must they always be swathed? I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not.

— Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son