Poison for Breakfast
"...'bewildered' is a word which here means 'you don't have any idea what is happening,' and 'you' is a word which doesn't just mean you. It means everyone."
"It is one of the mysteries of the world that you can change the landscape with your mind, that everything around you will move and shift just from the way you are imagining them."
"I always like to have a book with me at breakfast, although sometimes I do not read much of it."
"Maybe it would work today, I thought. Maybe philosophy could save me."
"...even though the author is dead, her work still haunts people, which could mean she was a ghost too."
"Nowadays, philosophers are hardly ever tortured, because most people ignore them completely, and it's hard to say which is the worse fate for philosophy and the people who practice it, being tortured or being ignored."
"...this is the [Zeno] paradox: Nobody can ever get anywhere, and yet of course people move around all the time."
"The world can be wide open around you, but you can feel CLOSED AROUND THE WORLD."
"Everyone feels [displaced] sometimes, and some people feel this way all the time."
"...many of the people who believe in reincarnation believe that a human is the highest form... I looked at the birds. They did not seem to be thinking I was the highest form..."
"They do that. It was a simple and elegant answer to my question."
"Perhaps you are one of us too, investigating your life and thinking about the world, always feeling native to nowhere."
"Tzimtzum proposes that the world did come from nothing, but that the nothing was made by something, so something made nothing in order for something to come from nothing, and this may be why we spend most of our lives drifting between nothing and something."
"To think of something, you need nothing, just like whoever or whatever created the world..."
"Telling yourself that something does not matter is one of the loneliest things you can do, because you only say it, of course, about the things that matter very much. But often, and this is the lonely part, they only matter to you."
"Being clumsy treats you to views of the world of which graceful people never get a glimpse."
"Life is like this, and literature, imaginary conversations, and true stories mingling like languages in translation."
"The pursuit of truth and wisdom instead requires asking questions..."
"... your mind wanders as if on a voyage, and as with any voyage, you are likely to discover something along the way. It is almost as if enormous philosophical questions are not designed to be answered at all, but just to make you think."
"'Well, that seems like a big part of your occupation, Mr. Snicket. Isn't it? You walk the streets, usually with a book and some scraps of paper in your pocket, thinking about things and writing them down, and sooner or later you end up in a library."
"'We never know when some scrap of literature will have its finest hour.'...'So what do we do?'...'We keep reading,... and it just might be our turn to triumph.'"
"It was a bewildering thought, but the history of literature is the history of bewilderment. Writers all over the world and all across history have been bewildered by the world and all the things in it they cannot imagine, which is why they are -- we are -- writing them down, to try and imagine them."
"Nobody knows anything at all. We have no idea what is happening. We are all bewildered."
"We must read mysterious literature, and be as bewildered by it as we are by the world, and we should write down our ideas, turning our stories, as if by magic, into literature."