Clergyman's

“The sun would still rise, the seasons would still come, life would continue. I was thankful to have been a part of it; I would take the memories and savor them for the life ahead. I had been given the components that would comprise the fate of my destiny; they had aged into my soul so that part of the past would always remain with me. They would be there for me to draw strength from on days in my future when death would seem a triumph and life too hard to live any more.”
— Sara Niles

“My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author’s story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family’s table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka’s work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka’s brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka’s, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There’s an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer’s work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer’s actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer’s life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming.”
— Jonathan Franzen

“The greatest of tragedies is a life lived without knowing its purpose. Discover your purpose and life will take on a new meaning.”
— Mensah Oteh