Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.

And, as with all retold tales that are in people's hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in between anywhere.

But on the whole the impression was neither of tragedy nor of comedy. There was no describing it. It was manifold and various; there were tears and laughter, happiness and woe; it was tedious and interesting and indifferent; it was as you saw it: it was tumultuous and passionate; it was grave; it was sad and comic; it was trivial; it was simple and complex; joy was there and despair; the love of mothers for their children, and of men for women; lust trailed itself through the rooms with leaden feet, punishing the guilty and the innocent, helpless wives and wretched children; drink seized men and women and cost its inevitable price; death sighed in these rooms; and the beginning of life, filling some poor girl with terror and shame, was diagnosed there. There was neither good nor bad there. There were just facts. It was life.

The world out there was the way it was no matter how much doubt or hope or hate a person breathed into it.

So I came to the realization: Nothing in life is unfair. It's just life.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Life is truth...

But I'm simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I've seen it. It's all here: the good, the bad and the ugly.

Life was nothing other than what came and went with each passing moment.

I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them.

I didn't have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonderful. The simple truth was that life was both. p 214

Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.

There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.

No sentimentality, no romance, no false hope, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!