Lama Choedak

"Fatigue begins when difficulty discourages us; but when difficulty reminds us of our purpose, it can give us a more flexible and elastic quality—we are less likely to shy away from difficulty and more likely to see it as a source of personal growth. When we forget this purpose our difficulties overtake us and become an object of resentment. Instead of being able to focus on the positive purpose of our difficulties, we become completely taken over by the difficulties themselves, which is the negative aspect of suffering. When we hold onto our difficulties we soon fall into despair and depression. We become so obsessed with our own problems that we are unable to reflect that others are going through much greater difficulties than we are."



Healing Relationships: Buddhist insights for enduring happiness
by Lama Choedak Yuthok
Lothian Books, Melbourne, 2005
Page 209

Lama Choedak

"The secret of forgetting our own suffering is thinking of the suffering of others. As soon as we turn our minds to thinking of the suffering of others, our own suffering becomes a powerful reminder of what we can do to relieve the situation, of how we can turn a difficult situation into something very empowering. Our own suffering is so powerful that we can feel the sufferings of others with greater compassion than they know how to create themselves. Instead of fatiguing us, our own suffering gives us the courage to bear our difficulties. In the midst of our difficulties we realise the purpose of our own suffering: to endure our difficulties and to enable us to make a difference to others who are suffering also, by understanding the true meaning of suffering. But much of the time our mind falls very short of this level of understanding and we do not see the benefit of our difficulties, as we are trying to avoid them."

Healing Relationships: Buddhist insights for enduring happiness
by Lama Choedak Yuthok
Lothian Books, Melbourne, 2005
Page 208

Douglas Adams

"Maybe, Who cares?" said Slartibartfast before Arthur got too excited. "Perhaps I’m old and tired," he continued, "but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied."

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
Picador, London, 2002 [first published in 1979]
Page 161

Douglas Adams

"All right," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the Great Question..."
"Yes...!"
"Of Life, the Universe and Everything..." said Deep Thought.
"Yes...!"
"Is..." said Deep Thought, and paused.
"Yes...!"
"Is..."
"Yes...!!!...?"
"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
Picador, London, 2002 [first published in 1979]
Page 152

Douglas Adams

"Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason why he [Zaphod] had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did."

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
Picador, London, 2002 [first published in 1979]
Page 77

Arthur W. Frank

"Holding onto that question—how did you spend today?—reminds me to feel and see and hear. It is too easy to become distracted. When the ordinary becomes frustrating, I have to remember those times when the ordinary was forbidden to me. When I was ill, all I wanted was to get back into the ordinary flux of activity. Now that I am back in the ordinary, I have to retain a sense of wonder at being here."

At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness
by Arthur W. Frank
Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1991
Page 134

Arthur W. Frank

"The only real difference between people is not health or illness but the way each holds onto a sense of value in life."

At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness
by Arthur W. Frank
Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1991
Page 134

Thorton Wilder

"But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thorton Wilder
Penguin Books, London, 1987 [1927]
Page 124

Arthur W. Frank

"The opportunity is to recognize that although illness just happens, we can organize its experience to make our lives meaningful. We can have both a faith that allows us to accept whatever just happens and at the same time a will to bring about the change we desire."

"We are most faithful when active, just as we struggle best when we do not fight."

At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness
by Arthur W. Frank
Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1991
Page 90

Arthur W. Frank

"I reserve the name “caregivers” for the people who are willing to listen to ill persons and to respond to their individual experiences. Caring has nothing to do with categories; it shows the person that her life is valued because it recognizes what makes her experience particular. On person has no right to categorize another, but we do have the privilege of coming to understand how each of us is unique. When the caregiver communicates to the ill person that she cares about that uniqueness, she makes the person’s life meaningful. And as that person’s life story becomes part of her own, the caregiver’s life is made meaningful as well. Care is inseparable from understanding, and like understanding, it must be symmetrical. Listening to another, we hear ourselves. Caring for another, we either care for ourselves as well, or we end in burnout and frustration."

At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness
by Arthur W. Frank
Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1991
Page 48

Alice Munro

"Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back--during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children--into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn't there."

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
by Alice Munro
Vintage, London, 2002
Page 223

Alice Munro

"What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen."

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
by Alice Munro
Vintage, London, 2002
Page 217

Alice Munro

"Nina had made inquiries about a wheelchair. He had not opposed this. They no longer talked about what they called the Big Shutdown. She had even wondered if they--or he--might be entering a phase she had read about, a change that came on people sometimes in the middle of a fatal illness. A measure of optimism struggling to the fore, not because it was warranted, but because the whole experience had become a reality and not an abstraction, the ways of coping had become permanent, not a nuisance.

The end is not yet. Live for the present. Seize the day.

That kind of development seemed out of character for Lewis. Nina would not have thought him capable of even the most useful self-deception. But she could never have imagined him overtaken by physical collapse, either. And now that one unlikely thing had happened, couldn't others? Was it not possible that the changes that happened with other people might occur with him too? The secret hopes, the turning aside, the sly bargains?"

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
by Alice Munro
Vintage, London, 2002
Page 124

Peter J Conradi

"... one Tibetan teacher told his students to “become ordinary...."

Going Buddhist: panic and emptiness, the Buddha and me
by Peter J Conradi
Short Books, London, 2004
Page 85

Daniel Kahneman

"Dan Kahneman suggests that, when faced with a difficult decision, we recognise the influence of our emotions and ask ourselves "What will I feel then", rather than "What do I want now."

"Risky Business" by Dr Norman Swan
The Sydney Morning Herald, June 23 2005
Page 4-5 [Health&Science section]

Nikki Gemmell

"[This I believe...] That kindness is life-affirming."

I Believe This by John Marsden (editor)
Random House Australia, 2004
Page 99

Nikki Gemmell

"I want to be surrounded by heart-lifters, not heart sinkers."

I Believe This by John Marsden (editor)
Random House Australia, 2004
Page 99

Ihab Hassan

"All leaving is loss, every departure a small death--yes, journeys secretly know their end."

Out of Egypt. Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography by Ihab Hassan
Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1986
Page 106

Ihab Hassan

"Men and women have flocked to America, fleeing or seeking, driven by the most diverse motives. But the psychological exile stands apart, his case shadier, thicker with complicity and silent intrigue. Who are these beings, full of dark conceits, rushing to meet the future while part of them still stumbles about, like a blind speleologist, in caverns of the past? What urgency speaks through their self-banishment?."

Out of Egypt. Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography by Ihab Hassan
Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1986
Page 106

Ihab Hassan

"The Imagination is the teleological organ of evolution. It predicts change, it directs change, it fulfills change."

Out of Egypt. Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography by Ihab Hassan
Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1986
Page 57

Ihab Hassan

"This was a time out of time, will-less and free, irrecoverable except as a charmed space, the green garden each child carries within him, perhaps to inhabit again only at the instant of death."

Out of Egypt. Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography by Ihab Hassan
Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1986
Page 54

Shirley Hazzard

"Her life, her long life, so she was thinking at this moment, had reached some point--not of completeness, perhaps, but of sufficiency. Although she had often been grieved by her own actions and those of others, she could hardly think of anything she wished undone. This was not from any sense of the perfection of the whole but from a now manifest continuity--and possibly because the imperfections had been so numerous that it would not be possible to subtract them and have anything left to assess. If she had sometimes been made aware that she was less rancorous and less infirm than many others, or more passionately anxious to understand, she attributed this to propitious circumstances, to the favourable conditions of her youth, the good influences of her friends and family. It was this benevolently directed course of her life that she now felt she could discern."

The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard
Penguin Books, Ringwood,Victoria, 1969
Page 111

Shirley Hazzard

"Looking at Luisa, Tancredi wondered: How can you bear it, this memory, this recollecting of things utterly and unthinkably past? He himself was already finding it intolerable to remember--not merely the people he would never speak with again, or the houses in which he could never hope to see them, but fragments of mood, light, sensation, which he couldn't recapture and which, revealing themselves to him only in the subsequent act of remembering, then seemed to remain permanently and to accumulate significance in direct proportion to their increasing remoteness in his experience. The very word experience, at that moment, was more poignant to him than grief or love."

The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard
Penguin Books, Ringwood,Victoria, 1969
Page 97

Shirley Hazzard

"She lowered her head, defeated, and began to put the contents of the dressing-table drawer in order. These onslaughts of his were like outcroppings of rock in the surface of her day. Sometimes, as now, her heart twisted and broke under his determination to wound her. At others, she was almost convinced that she felt nothing more for him, that he had overdrawn on her endurance: then she would stay silent for a while, almost at peace, beyond his reach, not knowing whether she had been utterly vanquished or become completely invincible. However, it required merely some slight attention on his part to restore all her apprehensions--for these extremes of feeling only existed within the compass of her love."

Cliffs of Fall by Shirley Hazzard
Penguin Books, New York, New York, 1963
Page 90