The struggle is so (beat) pointless. We live exactly as insects, and yet we look on them with horror, because they are us without justification, without the endless need to do things. The conscious mind is a freak accident, a program for double-checking cause-and-effect logic extended far beyond its purpose, an anti-virus program gone out of control.

Alan Ryker, When Cthulhu Met Atlach-Nacha [Amazon]

Hermetic quote Ryker When Cthulhu Met Atlach-Nacha struggle pointless conscious mind freak accident

Consider also:

  1. “The whole Rebellion was a highly illegal action bordering on treason, sweetheart,” he reminded her. “When the rules don’t work, you break ’em.”
  2. “These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise.”
  3. “I don’t think anyone ever goes into a war without the nagging feeling that there might have been some other way. Even when every other way has already been tried and hasn’t worked.”
  4. “Reading and its rituals became acts of resistance; as the Italian psychologist Andrea Devoto noted, ‘everything could be treated as resistance because everything was prohibited.'”
  5. “I don’t want to be high any more or again, and this sends me into a spiral of misery, life seems completely empty if this magic world is too painful for me. I want to die and I have infinite terror of the pain of every form of death. I see emptiness and hopelessness everywhere.”