All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnesses and concavities, through hollow and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour!
— Barbara Hepworth, 1970
When at the evening the winds come swelling from the east, and the great pall of the city’s smoke hangs wearily above the valley, then the red west glows like a dreamland down Carlisle Street, and, at the tolling of the supper-bell, throws the passing forms of students in dark silhouette against the sky. —W. E. B. DuBois, 1903 (6-7)
So the train came… and then he was away with a puff and a roar into the great yellow world that flamed and flared about the doubtful pilgrim. —W. E. B. DuBois, 1903 (6-7)
The salmon were running, and the myriad fins of the onrushing multitude were churning all the stream into a silvery glow, wonderfully beautiful and impressive in the ebon darkness. —John Muir, 1909
Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. —Zora Neale Hurston, 1928
This feeling runs deep in life; it brings stray cats running over endless miles, and birds homing from the ends of the earth. It is as though all living creatures, and particularly the more intelligent, can survive only by fixing or transforming a bit of time into space or by securing a bit of space with its objects immortalized and made permanent in time. —Loren Eisley, 1953
No house mouse, no Mus domesticus, had kicked up this little heap of earth or sought refuge under a fern root in a flower pot. I thought of the desperate little creature I had seen fleeing from the wild rose thicket. Through intricacies of pipes and attics, he, or one of his fellows, had climbed to this high green solitary room. I could visualize what had occurred. He had an image in his head, a world of seed pods and quiet, of green sheltering leaves in the dim light among the weed stems. It was the only world he knew and it was gone. Somehow in his flight he had found his way to this room with drawn shades where no one would come till nightfall. And here he had smelled green leaves and run quickly up the flower pot to dabble his paws in common earth.
[…]
About my ferns there had begun to linger the insubstantial vapor of an autumn field, the distilled essence, as it were, of a mouse brain in exile from its home. It was a small dream, like our dreams, carried a long and weary journey along pipes and through spider webs past holes over which loomed the shadows of waiting cats, and finally, desperately, into this room where he had played in the shuttered dal light for an hour among the green ferns on the floor. Every day these invisible dreams pass us on the street, or rise from beneath our feet, or look out upon us from beneath a bush. —Loren Eisley, 1953
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the pre-natal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). —Vladimir Nabokov, 1966
But it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia. —Lewis Thomas, 1972
Go. I roll the dice — a six and a two. Though the air I move my token, the Flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs roam. —John McPhee, 1972
Then, beyond Atlantic Avenue, North Carolina moves on into the vast ghetto, the bulk of the city, and it looks like Metz in 1919, Cologne in 1944. Nothing has actually exploded. It is not bomb damage. It is deep and complex decay. Roofs are off. Bricks are scattered in the street. People sit on porches, six deep, at nine on a Monday morning. When they go off to wait in unemployment lines, they wait sometimes two hours. Between Mediterranean and Baltic runs a chain link fence, enclosing rubble. A patrol car sits idling by the curb. In the back seat is a German shepherd. A sign on the fence says, “Beware of Bad Dogs. —John McPhee, 1972
I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes. They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling. Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not. It could not be predicted. —Joan Didion, 1975
It’s May and I’ve just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep sheltered from wind. A front is pulling the huge sky over me, and from the dark a hailstone has hit me on the head. I’m trailing a band of two thousand sheep across a stretch of Wyoming badlands, a fifty-mile trip that takes five days because sheep shade up in hot sun and won’t budge until it’s cool. Bunched together now, and excited into a run by the storm, they drift across dry land, tumbling into draws like water and surge out again onto the rugged, choppy plateaus that are the building blocks of this state. —Gretel Ehrlich, 1981
Wyoming seems to be the doing of a mad architect — tumbled and twisted, ribboned with faded deathbed colors, thrust up and pulled down as if the place had been startled out of a deep sleep and thrown into pure light. —Gretel Ehrlich, 1981
At night, by moonlight, the land is whittled to slivers – a ridge, a river, a strip of grassland stretching to the mountains, then the huge sky. One morning a full moon was setting in the west just as the sun was rising. I felt precariously balanced between the two as I loped across a meadow. For a moment, I could believe that the stars, which were still Wyoming. Visible, work like cooper’s bands, holding together. —Gretel Ehrlich, 1981
I lay in bed. My husband, Gary, was reading beside me. I lay in bed and looked at the painting on the hotel room wall. —Annie Dillard, 1982
As we lost altitude, the snows disappeared; our ears popped; the trees changed, and in the trees were strange birds. I watched the landscape innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the bottom while his air runs out. —Annie Dillard, 1982
All of us rugged individualists were wearing knit caps and blue nylon parkas. People were climbing the nearby hills and setting up shop in clumps among the dead grasses. It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on its last day. It looked as though we had all crawled out of spaceships and were preparing to assault the valley below. It looked as though we were scattered on hilltops at dawn to sacrifice virgins, make rain, set stone stelae in a ring. There was no place out of the wind. The straw grasses banged our legs. —Annie Dillard, 1982
We climbed and rested, sweating in the cold… —Annie Dillard, 1982
Distance blurred and blued the sight, so that the whole valley looked like a thickness or sediment at the bottom of the sky. —Annie Dillard, 1982
We got the light wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over. —Annie Dillard, 1982
The white ring and the saturated darkness made the earth and the sky look as they must look in the memories of the careless dead. What I saw, what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world. We had all died in our boots on the hilltops of Yakima, and were alone in eternity. Empty space stoppered our eyes and mouths; we cared for nothing. We remembered our living days wrong. —Annie Dillard, 1982
When I was young, the beauty of church always belonged to other people: the believers. They saw the same stained glass I saw, but when its jeweled light cut their skin into kaleidoscopic colors, they somehow belong in that light in a way I never would. They could feel the lilt and soar of the hymns as truth, as collective yearning, as a tin-can telephone connecting them to God. That’s what I told myself. I told myself I was alien to that beauty — I’d never be anything but an interloper lurking just outside its grace. —Leslie Jamison, 2019
His hands were large. My résumé lay flat on his desk. He had cleared a space amid the clutter, and he ran one of those big, sensitive, but also violent-looking hands over it again and again while he studied it, as though his hand were a scanner and would impart some key bit of information that reading never could. — Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, p 20, 2005
The dictionary definitions of words you hearing to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus. […]This, for example, came up while I was writing about the Atchafalaya, the huge river swamp in southern Louisiana, and how it looked from a small plane in the air. […] From the airplane, you could discern where these places were because, seen through the trees, there would be an interruption of the reflection of sunlight on water. What word or phrase was I going to Use for that reflection? I looked up “sparkle” in my old Webster’s Collegiate. It said: «See flash.'” 1 looked up Flash.” The definitions were followed by a presentation of synonyms: “flash, gleam, glance, glint, sparkle, glitter, scintillate, coruscate, glimmer, shimmer mean to shoot forth light.” I liked that last part, so I changed the manuscript to say, “The reflection of the sun races through the trees and shoots forth light from the water.”. — John McPhee, Draft #4, p 433, 2017
There was something low and greedy about this picture-taking, perhaps the popping of the flashbulbs in the sunlight, as if everything monstrous and overreaching in our insane public land were tamped together in the foolproof act of taking a sun-drenched picture at noon with no shadows and a flashbulb — do we sell insurance to protect our cadavers against the corrosion of the grave? — Norman Mailer, An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, p 318, 1962
Daily life is wonderfully full of things to see. Not only people’s movements, but the objects around them, the shape of the rooms they live in, the ornaments architects make around windows and doors, the peculiar ways buildings end in the air, the water tanks, the fantastic differences in their street façades on the first floor. — Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Street, p 446, 1965
But the face was too fine over which it mantled, and I am too old to have misunderstood it! —William Hazlitt, 1826
The ghost of friendship meets me at the door, and sits with me all dinner time. —William Hazlitt, 1826
The shadow we have wantonly evoked stands terrible before us and will not depart at our bidding. —Thomas Carlye, 1829
I gradually heard the orator in possession, spinning and humming like a great top, until he rolled, collapsed, and tumbled over… —Charles Dickens, 1860
Go, Lewes, and clap a hideous sea-anemone into a glass; I will put a cabman under mine, and make a vivisection of a butcher. —William Makepeace Thackeray, 1863
But as a rule, we should be very careful for our own sake not to speak much about what distresses us. Expression is apt to carry with it exaggeration, and this exaggerated form becomes henceforth that under which we represent out miseries to ourselves, so that they are thereby increase. —Mark Rutherford, 1900
No, perceptions fall into the brain as seeds into a furrowed field or even as sparks into a keg of powder. Each image breeds a hundred more, sometimes slowly and subterraneously, sometimes (when a passionate train is started) with a sudden burst of fancy. —George Santayana, 1905
The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. —G. K. Chesterton, 1901
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits to be provoked. —Katherine Anne Porter, 1948
I object to going to church except to hear the Athanasian Creed, which stretches the power of belief and leaves one with the same pleasant, warm, tired feeling as an attack of yawning. —Rebecca West, 1913
Personal grace of a high order was accentuated by dainty dressing; his frock coat fitted him like the pelt of a young antelope, and his trousers had a silvery gleam like willows seen at twilight. He was like a pure white rose. —Rebecca West, 1913
Outside my window the night is struggling to wake; in the moonlight, the blinded garden dreams so vividly of its lost colors that the black roses are almost crimson, the trees stand expectantly on the verge of living greenness. —Aldous Huxley, 1931
His poetry is a strong and rapid torrent, which pours in its infracted course over rocks and precipices… —William Drummond on Persisus, circa 16xx.
It gives one a feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, and not through nor satisfied because a Devonian fish managed to end up as a two-legged character with a straw hat. There are other things brewing and growing in the oceanic vat. It pays to know this. It pays to know that there is just as much future as there is past. —Loren Eisley, 1957
The winds blew until the red stones took on the polish of reflecting mirrors. —Loren Eisley, 1957
The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across that threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the water weeds. —Loren Eisley, 1957
There are two ways to seek the doorway: in the swamps of the inland waterways and along the tide flats of the estuaries where rivers come to the sea. By those two pathways life came ashore. It was not the magnificent march through the breakers and up the cliffs that we fondly imagine. It was a stealthy advance made in suffocation and terror, amidst the leaching bite of chemical discomfort. It was made by the failures of the sea. —Loren Eisley, 1957
We teach the past, we see farther backward into time than any race before us, but we stop at the present, or, at best, we project far into the future idealized version of ourselves. —Loren Eisley, 1957
It is an error to regard the imagination as a mainly revolutionary force —if it destroys and alters, it also fuses hitherto isolated beliefs, insights, mental habits, into strongly unified systems. These, if they are filled with sufficient energy and force of will — and it may be added, fantasy, which is less frightened by the facts and creates ideal models in terms of which the fact are ordered in the mind —sometimes transform the outlook of an entire people and generation. —Isaiah Berlin, 1949
A welcoming tunnel had at once blotted out the sigh of my parents, as they disappeared in a swirl of yellow smoke. —Richard Cobb, 1985
It was that verse about becoming again as a little child that caused the first sharp waning of my Christian sympathies. If the Kingdom of Heaven could only be entered by those fulfilling such a condition I knew I should be unhappy there. It was not the prospect of being deprived of money, keys, wallet, letters, books, long-playing records, drinks, the opposite sex, and other solaces of adulthood that upset me (I should have been about eleven), but having to put up indefinitely with the company of other children, their noise, their nastiness, their boasting, their back-answers, their cruelty, their silliness. —Philip Larkin, 1919
But in the crisp’s case, the golden age was recent, a threshold between two ages of industrial technology —the transitional period between the grinding poverty that nineteenth-century social moralists founds so repugnant and the new affluence that twentieth-century social moralists find so repugnant. —Reyner Banham, 1970
Next time you go to one of these functions, and find yourself thinking that a splodge of onion dip would go nicely with the glass of foaming Silesian sherry the Dean has just pressed on you, have a good look at the contents of the bowl of dip. The chances are that you will see a surface so pocked over by the shards of wrecked crisps that it looks like the Goodwin Sands during the Battle of Britain. —Reyner Banham, 1970
World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual. Had Claudius not wanted an easy conquest so the he might celebrate a triumph at Rome, Britain would not have been conquered in AD 44. —Gore Vidal, 1959
For sixty miles the road plods on through this monotony and then it falls over a precipice. Suddenly it crosses the lip of the high plateau and tumbles helter-skelter, lickety-split into a chasm: and as you slither down the horse-shoe bends you see in the ravine below you, secreted in a fold of the massif, the city of La Paz. — Jan Morris, 1963
If you push into a thicket, you sometimes come across a greening sheep skull. Outside the thicket, plump, living sheep tear confidently at the grass, undismayed. We are like that, and should be. We miss our dead —sometimes we even grieve. It is hard to imagine that one day we shall be among them. But meanwhile it is well to remember that through all sort of cycles of change they nourish us, and continue to set us problems that will be with us until we die. — P. J. Kavanagh, 1983
This galls us. We wish to destroy him, this clown of legerity, who bounces higher and higher off the net of laws that would enmesh us, who weightlessly spiders up the rigging to the dizzying spotlit tip of the tent-space and stands there in a glittering trapeze suit, all white, like the chalk-daubed clown who among the Australian aborigines moves in and out f the sacred ceremonial, mocking it. — John Updike, 1983
We spend the afternoon in a world so alien, so complete and so beautiful unto itself that it was scarcely necessary to speak at all. — Joan Didion, 1970
When I was young, the beauty of church always belonged to other people: the believers. They saw the same stained glass I saw, but when its jeweled light cut their skin into kaleidoscopic colors, they somehow belong in that light in a way I never would. The could feel the lilt and soar of the hymns as truth, as collective yearning, as a tin-can telephone connecting them to God. That’s what I told myself. I told myself I was alien to that beauty — I’d never be anything but an interloper lurking just outside its grace. — Leslie Jamison, 2019
I can see the paragraphs I am writing as little jail cells, penning me into perspectives, conceits, ideas, jokes, and memories — stories! — Peter Schjeldahl , 2019
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers. — G. K. Chesterton
I awoke early, called not only by the glacier, which had been on my mind all night, but by a grand flood-storm. The wind was blowing a gale from the north and the rain was flying with the clouds in a wide passionate horizontal flood, as if it were all passing over the country instead of falling on it. The main perennial streams were booming high above their banks, and hundreds of new ones, roaring like the sea, almost covered the lofty gray walls of the inlet with white cascades and falls. I had intended making a cup of coffee and getting something like a breakfast before starting, but when I heard the storm and looked out I made haste to join it; for many of Nature’s finest lessons are to be found in her storms…. —John Muir, 1909
We landed in Pamplona at night. The streets were solid with people dancing. Music was pounding and throbbing. fireworks were being set off from the big public square. All the carnivals I had ever seen paled down in comparison. A rocket exploded over our heads with a blinding burst and the stick came swirling and whishing down. Dancers, snapping their fingers and whirling in perfect time through the crowd, bumped into us before we could get our bags down from the top of the station bus. —Ernest Hemingway, 1923
So the train came… and then he was away with a puff and a roar into the great yellow world that flamed and flared about the doubtful pilgrim. —W. E. B. DuBois, 1903
The salmon were running, and the myriad fins of the onrushing multitude were churning all the stream into a silvery glow, wonderfully beautiful and impressive in the ebon darkness. —John Muir, 1909
For extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize. Hence a thing I had noted before but never understood: the fact that anti-Semitic statements were generally delivered in an atmosphere of profundity. … To arrive, indeed, at the idea of a Jew was, for these grouping minds, an exercise in Platonic thought, a discovery of essence, and to be able to add the great corollary, ‘Some of my best friends are Jews,’ was to find the philosopher’s cleft between essence and existence. —Mary McCarthy, 1953
Then I came to a sign which informed me that this field was to be the site of a new Wanamaker suburban store. Thousands of obscure lives were about to perish, the spores of puffballs would go smoking off to new fields, and the bodies of little white-footed mice would be crunched under the inexorable wheels of the bulldozers. Life disappears or modifies its appearances so fast that everything takes on an aspect of Illusion – a momentary fizzing and boiling with smoke rings, like pouring dissident chemicals into a retort. Here man was advancing, but in a few years his plaster and bricks would be disappearing once more into the insatiable maw of the clover. —Loren Eisley, 1953
And third among the great sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling. —Susan Sontag, 1964
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style — but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not. —Susan Sontag, 1964
Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I have journeyed back in thought – with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went – to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. —Vladimir Nabokov, 1966
I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. One shared it just as excited bathers share shining seawater – with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. […] Indeed, from my present ridge of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time, I see my diminutive self as celebrating, on that August day 1903, the birth of sentient life. —Vladimir Nabokov, 1966
From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows. marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin. —Vladimir Nabokov, 1966
We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party. —Lewis Thomas, 1972
But it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia. —Lewis Thomas, 1972
Go. I roll the dice — a six and a two. Though the air I move my token, the Flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs roam. —John McPhee, 1972
I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you. —Adrienne Rich, 1977
I had, at this time [after being diagnosed with MS], a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and fund that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. — Joan Didion, 1975
From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. — Annie Dillard, 1982
The white ring and the saturated darkness made the earth and the sky look as they must look in the memories of the careless dead. What I saw, what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world. We had all died in our boots on the hilltops of Yakima, and were alone in eternity. Empty space stoppered our eyes and mouths; we cared for nothing. We remembered our living days wrong. —Annie Dillard, 1982
The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at forty thousand feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar these bring portents with them, and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose. —John Updike, 1993
To push open a door into such silence: the absolute emptiness of a house whose occupants have departed. Often, the crack of broken glass underfoot. A startled buzzing of flies, hornets. The slithering, ticklish sensation of a garter snake crawling across the floor. —Joyce Carole Oates, 1995
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
—William Wordsworth
And hermits are contented with their cells;
and students with their pensive citadels.
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom Ourselves,
no prison is: and hence for me,In sundry moods,
’twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
What made Wells a true visionary was not so much his ability to predict so many of the technological marvels of the late twentieth century, but his prescience in setting them in a world where men were still wearing neckties. —Geoffroy Nunberg
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. — Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old
At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences…. While it may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is ever changing in detail. Only partial control can be exercised over its growth and form. There is no final result, only a continuous succession of phases. —Kevin Lynch, Image of the City
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. […] We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. —Joan Didion, 1975
The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant place and time. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of oneself, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased and is the basis of the objection to vows of any kind. —G.K. Chesterton, In Defense of Rash Vows
If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than bad morals. — G. K. Chesterton, On Lying in Bed, circa 190x
One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’ too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and war, great achievements and deep ambiguities. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts.
One is more conscious of transience and beauty. At eighty, one can take the long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like which I could not do when I was forty or sixty. I do not think of old age as an ever-grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together. — Oliver Sacks, Gratitude, 201x
I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written… Above all I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure. — Oliver Sacks, Gratitude, 201x
The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything… — Oliver Sacks, Gratitude, 201x