"I tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems: in order to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where things were going, to sketch for myself a reality." —Paul Celan

"For the Romantics, the purpose of turning inward is not to circulate among subjective opinions nor is it to assert our subjective freedom by way of our independent thoughts or opinions. Rather, it is to attend to the fluctuations of consciousness as harbingers of meaning—the inner is a doorway to the meaning of the outer that must be walked through." —Megan Laverty

"The new is not something we will, something we can make happen; it is something that we 'let' happen.... Receptivity is essential to 'making' the new possible—receptivity to the present, to the difference between today and yesterday, receptivity to as yet undisclosed possibilities." —Nikolas Kompridis

"Aristotle's paradigm of a virtuous man was somebody who thoroughly enjoyed carrying out his virtuous endeavours. Such a person is quite different from Kant's cold-blooded duty-doer." —Anthony Kenny

"In the general relation the philosopher establishes between the world and thought he does nothing else than make objective to himself the relation his particular consciousness maintains with the real world." —Karl Marx

"Working in philosophy ... is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)." —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Contemplative attention to radical plurality is not a retreat from life, a lack of interest in the fray, but a certain kind of interest in human life, born of wonder at it. —D. Z. Phillips

"Hegel here makes a point about the grammatical and the logical form of propositions and how it can be, so he thinks, misleading. If we say, 'God is the moral order of the world,' it looks like we're using 'God' as a referring expression (and thus picking him out by doing so). We then supply predicates to it to determine it. However, the point of saying something like 'God is the moral order of the world' is to do no such thing. We are instead trying to develop a concept of what it is that we are talking about when we talk about God." —Terry Pinakrd

"I can only choose within the world I can see." —Iris Murdoch

"[T]he family's ability to avoid facing the child's emotions was so powerful, so entrenched, and so seemingly necessary for their own sense of 'okayness' that the child would self-destruct before their eyes, while the family held on to the notion that they could do nothing to save them." —Mirisse Foroughe

A tree with shallow roots, reaching for the sky, Yet beneath the surface, no grounding lies. Stretched thin, overreaching, in the world's unyielding gaze, The neglected heart beats on, through the endless maze.

Unseen and unheard, in the silence they persist, The neglected carry their history, in clenched and trembling fist. In the depth of their darkness, their pain finds its voice, A testament to their struggle, their unchosen "choice."

Each verse echoes with a whisper, a sigh, "Can you hear me, can you see me, as I try? Underneath the achievement's glitter and gloss, Can you find the child who's feeling lost?"

"The now ill-fated behaviors of traumatised individuals do not respond well to the power of positive thinking or simplistic solutions to "fix" the problem: sooner or later you must go to the source and discover that wounded person inside, the child you once were, whom, upon closer examination, you may find you despise because of how compliant, weak, seductive, terrified or frozen he or she was. The perpetrator once lived outside, but for most people with childhood trauma the persecutor now resides inside." —Bessel A. van der Kolk

"I pay, I pay, and I pay. I paid with my childhood, I paid with my innocence, I paid with my adolescence, and I paid for all sorts of different forms of therapy, often by inadequate therapists. I have trained dozens of therapists how to treat people like me, but it was I who had to pay the bills." —van der Kolk's traumatized client who never gave up paying (trying)

"If you are not known, seen, and appropriately responded to as a child, you will find it difficult not only to know who you are—what you feel like and what your purpose is—but also to feel safe in intimate relationships, understand how you affect other people, and safely negotiate the effects other people have on you. You apply what you have learned: maybe compliance worked, or perhaps you were always on guard, or were the toughest kid on the block, or managed your feelings by burning yourself with cigarettes or by cutting yourself with razor blades. These behaviors then become the stuff that needs to be "fixed." ... [I]n order to resolve them, we need to revisit and restructure the drama of the unwanted child. You need to come to a point that you can lovingly and compassionately observe what you had to endure as a child and give the part of yourself the care that was lacking back then. Getting there always is an arduous process. One keeps hoping that other people will love that wounded kid that you yourself can't stand.... [B]ut as long as you can't stand who you are, other people's affection tends to fall on fallow ground." —Bessel A. van der Kolk

A ghost among the living, I tread on the edge, In a world full of color, I'm a shadow on the ledge. The stinging frost of neglect, it consumes my heart, In a painted portrait, I'm the unfinished part.

"I should have soared," I confess to the night, "But here I remain, grounded, devoid of flight." The chains of the past, heavy and unseen, Bound my spirit, my wings clipped and unclean.

Emotions silenced, whispers lost, a voice untimely stilled, As fragile wings of dreams took flight, my spirit's song was chilled.

The petrichor after the rain brought back some of the most pleasant memories of my childhood.