History Quotes / DesperatelyLookingForAPurposeInLife

'''Reese''': Well, I tried to quit, [[DeadpanSnarker but some jackass]] [[CallBack told me I needed a purpose.]]

-->-- '''Michael W. Smith''', "Place In This World"

-->-- '''Princeton''', '''''Theatre/AvenueQ'''''

->''"Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored."''
-->-- '''Creator/IanFleming''', ''Literature/FromRussiaWithLove''

->I know what you're thinking, [[WeNamedTheMonkeyJack John]], and you're quite mistaken. I'm not ignoring [[{{Robinsonade}} my current circumstances]], nor am I dwelling on my past. [[WeWait I'm simply biding my time]]. I could salvage the transport for parts... making a deep-space signal beacon would be child's play. I could build a hundred things from that mound of Hynerian scrap outside. Trust me, John, if I decide to escape this frozen purgatory, [[BadassBoast nothing will stop me]]. I simply have nowhere to go and no one to go to... no purpose worthy of the effort.

->The sheer predictability of life in an American suburb left me hoping— somewhat irresponsibly— for a hurricane or a tornado or something that would require us to all band together to survive. Something that would make us feel like a tribe. What I wanted wasn’t destruction and mayhem but the opposite: [[FireForgedFriends solidarity]]. I wanted the chance to prove my worth to my community and my peers, but I lived in a time and a place where nothing dangerous ever really happened. Surely this was new in the human experience, I thought. How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage?

->''What did I want?\\

I wanted Prestor John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be--instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.''

I wanted a Roc's egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword,. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get u feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a like wench for my droit du seigneur--I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.

->''The wind is moving,''
->''But I am standing still.''\\

->''"I remember your kind, but you seem... different. Unfocused. Hungrier, somehow. I saw you before, but you haven't always seemed so desperate to feed. What is it that has changed? I think that people - living people - know too much. They have learned too much, and what they have not learned, they can create. I think that, perharps, they don't ''need'' your lessons anymore. So, of course, you must make yourself a purpose. It is terrible to not have a purpose. It is death."''