I know you not quite wellYet I foolishly surrender my mind to you. Slowly and carefully you have cast a spellNow my virgin heart only longs for you. There is no need to push, I am already falling. Once proudly tall, I’m no longer standing. Knowing well that I am doomed to misery,I will roll the dice and take delight in my suffering.

This was especially true in some millennialist sects that filled their literature with paintings of Armageddon. Pictures of terrified people running away from some formless fiery doom that burned their world down behind them, while smug worshipers—of the correct religion, of course—watched from safety as God got with the smiting.

We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we’ve too often doomed ourselves to be.

When God grabs you by the scruff of the neck then although theoretically you have a freedom to say 'no', in another sense, actually, you can't say no because it's like Jeremiah. 'God, you have cheated me. You called me to be a prophet against the people that I love, and all that I proclaim is words of doom and judgement.' And yet if I say 'I will shut up', I can't.

And each ripple builds and builds into the tidal wave of anarchy to which we are now doomed.

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.

She told herself that she was happy to meet her executioner.

No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.

Ignorance and weakness is not an impediment to survival. Arrogance is.

I ask, ‘Is the cup half-empty or half-full?’ And when I ask that question, I am amazed at how many people have no cup.