“Oh, God, help me! And I walked faster, my thoughts pursuing me, and I began to run, my frozen shoes squealing like mice, but running didn't help, the thoughts to the left and right and behind me. But as I ran, The Arm, that good left arm, took hold of the situation and spoke soothingly: ease up, Kid, it's loneliness, you're all alone in the world; your father, your mother, your faith, they can't help you, nobody helps anybody, you only help yourself, and that's why I'm here, because we are inseperable, and we'll take care of everything.”
― John Fante, 1933 Was a Bad Year

"Dostoevsky changed me. The Idiot, The Demons,
The Karamazov Brothers, The Gambler. He turned
me inside out like a glove. I realized that I could
breathe, I could see invisible horizons. The hatred
for my father melted. I loved my father, a poor
suffering and persecuted wretch. I also loved my
mother, and my whole family. It was time to become
a man...go out into the world. I wanted to think and
feel like Dostoevsky. I wanted to write."
― John Fante

"The ones that are truly worth loving are the ones
that make you a stranger to yourself, Those who
manage to eradicate you from your habitat and your
journey, and transplant you into another ecosystem,
managing to keep you alive in that jungle you do not
know and where you would certainly die were it not
that they are there and teach you the steps and
gestures and the words: and you, against all odds,
are able to repeat them."
― John Fante

"l looked at the faces around me and I knew mine
was like theirs. Faces with the blood drained
away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like
flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a
pretty vase."
― John Fante

“When your weakness are your strengths, you cry.”

— John Fante

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka