Pour le soldat atomique, si je suis qu’il veut.

“Do not allow yourself to be confused in your aloneness by the something within you that wishes to be released from it. This very wish, if you will calmly and deliberately use it as a tool, will help to expand your solitude into far distant realms. People have, with the help of so many conventions, resolved everything the easy way, on the easiest side of easy. But it is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us. It is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it…

…Love is a high inducement for individuals to ripen, to strive to mature in the inner self, to manifest maturity in the outer world, to become that manifestation for the sake of another. This is a great, demanding task; it calls one to expand one’s horizons greatly.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”

and

“Alice: Oh, Gertrude, we had wonderful adventures. Remember during the war, we were caught in the snow and I was sure we were on the wrong road, and I wanted to turn back? But you said, ‘Never mind. Right or wrong, it is the road we are on, and we are continuing on it.’
Gertrude: And we did. That is what we did.
Alice: Yes, we continued.
Gertrude: We always continued. We do still. We shall. We always shall.”

-Win Wells, “Gertude Stein and a Companion”