Kathleen Norris, Acedia & me
Chp.xv Acedia: A Commonplace Book

Thomas Pynchon (b 1937), Nearer, My Couch, to Thee
By the time of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1835), acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now an offense against the economy. Who is more guilty of sloth, a person who collaborates with the root of evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow? does he imply that the first is more slothful? or

Robert Nisbet (1913-1996), Prejudices
There is a history of boredom. It must have been first felt where man made the transition from a hunting or pastoral existence to village life and the tyrannies of soil and season. The word paradise comes from the Persian, where it originally meant 'wilderness', and there is no doubt a lesson there.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), The Unnamable
Can it be that one day.. I simply stayed in.. Perhaps that is how it began. You think you are simply resting, the better to act when the time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to do anything again.

Henry Fairlie (1924-1990)
it is the face of those who seem never to have known any springtime, in whom the sap seems never to have risen.

Dorothee Soelle (1929-2003), Suffering
That which gave life its meaning has become empty and void: it turned out to be an error, an illusion that is shattered, a guilt that cannot be rectified, a void. The paths that lead t this experience of nothingness are diverse, but the experience of annihilation that occurs in unremitting suffering is the same.



Karl Rahner (1904-1984), The Need and the Blessing of Prayer
Suddenly you will know that the petrifying visage of hopelessness is only God's rising in your soul, that the darkness of the world is nothing but God's radiance, which has no shadow, that the apparent waylessness is only the immensity of God, who does not need any ways because he is already there.
All the way to Heaven is Heaven, because He said, I am the Way. -St.Therese