Writing Prompt

Albert Einstein (from “Relativity”):

“In our endeavor to understand reality, we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case.”

George Orwell (from “Politics and the English Language”):

“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Zadie Smith (from “Changing My Mind”):

“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. Writing wakes me up. It forces me to see more sharply, speak more honestly, and confront the world with eyes wide open.”

Stephen Wolfram (from “A New Kind of Science”):

“Simple rules, iterated enough times, can generate incredible complexity. Complexity arises not from complicated rules, but from the repeated application of very simple ones.”

Susan Sontag (from “Regarding the Pain of Others”):

“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those specialized tourists known as journalists. Wars are now also living room sights and sounds. Information about what’s

Hannah Arendt (from “Eichmann in Jerusalem”):

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more

Vladimir Nabokov (from “Speak, Memory”):

“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 prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.”

Rachel Carson (from “Silent Spring”):

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

Joan Didion (from “On Keeping a Notebook”):

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. Keeping a notebook keeps alive some illusion of who we used to be, allowing us to maintain continuity with a self we’ve already