Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain we, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive. (43)
How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life.
A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They're just backing away from life.
Avoiding problems you need to face is avoiding the life you need to live.
It's a mistake to try to avoid the unpleasant things in life... But I'm beginning to consider it.
I realized that, for me, travel for work - I'm not speaking so much about travel for pleasure - had actually become a way of avoiding life.
The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.
