“If the least thing goes wrong with a saddle, or clothes, or a boot, you cannot find a soul to make repairs, and the other day a cobbler answered us, 'Yes, that's right, I'm a shoemaker, and sometimes I work, but I'm not in the mood right now.”

“Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.”

“The highest and most fruitful form of human freedom is found in accepting, even more than in dominating. We show the greatness of our freedom when we transform reality, but still more when we accept it trustingly as it is given to us day after day. It is natural and easy to go along with pleasant situations that arise without our choosing them. It becomes a problem, obviously, when things are unpleasant, go against us, or make us suffer. But it is precisely then that, in order to become truly free, we are often called to choose to accept what we did not want, and even what we would not have wanted at any price. There is a paradoxical law of human life here: one cannot become truly free unless one accepts not always being free!To achieve true interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom. This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness, this or that situation that life imposes on us, and so on. We find it difficult to do this, because we feel a natural revulsion for situations we cannot control. But the fact is that the situations that really make us grow are precisely those we do not control.”

“There are two things to be aware of if the fight against evil inclinations is to have any chance of success. First, our efforts will never be sufficient on their own. Only the grace of Christ can win us the victory. Therefore our chief weapons are prayer, patience, and hope. Second, one passion can only be cured by another - a misplaced love by a greater love, wrong behavior by right behavior that makes provisions for the desire underlying the wrongdoing, recognizes the conscious or unconscious needs that seek fulfillment and either offers them legitimate satisfaction or transfers them to something compatible with the person's calling.”

“Still, when I looked behind the faces of those around me, all I saw was insanity, unrest, and anguish; or suffering, fear, and loneliness; or boredom, or solitude, or rage and impotence - shit, what was there to be happy about? Some fun, right? I saw a few pretty girls, but they seemed ugly to me, and the men seemed stupid...What I wanted was to fade into the shadows. I wanted a sad world, a cold one - a world without hope, without substance, without light. That's how it was. I wanted to plunge to the bottom...Sometimes you just want to see the whole show fold - the sky fall. Anyway, this was my state of mind, and I hadn't drunk a drop.”

“I turned my back to her. I felt a slight burning on the back of my neck. “Listen to me,” I went on. “I never was much for fucking around, I never got much out of it. I know that everybody else does it; but it’s no fun if you just do like everybody else. To tell you the truth, it bores me, It does you good to live according to your ideas, to not betray yourself, not cop out at the last minute just because some girl has a nice ass, or someone offers you a huge check, or because the path of least resistance runs by your front door. It does you good to hang tough. It’s good for the soul.” I turned around to tell her the Big Secret; “Over Dispersal, I choose Concentration. I have one life—the only thing I’m interested in is making it shine.”

“However, in fetishism the desired object is displaced; and in this context (“The Apparition” by Guy De Maupassant) it is the desiring object, so to speak. In other words, have we ever seen a boot in love with a fetishist?”