Writing Prompt

Rebecca Solnit (from “Hope in the Dark”):

“Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency, new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.”

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

Nancy Zuo (from “the case for virtual reality”):

“i'm still hopeful in vr. i really am. the magic is still there. it is alive. it’s just in the arts, not in tech. greedy investors and businessmen want to make it into a business plan and be in on the gold rush early. it's always been the case. edison with film, hearst with newspapers, steve jobs with

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.”

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.”

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

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.”

C. S. Lewis (from “The Weight of Glory”):

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.”

Henrik Karlsson (from “The Third Chair”):

“The stale, dry air reactivated feelings I had forgotten, feelings I had when I sat down here writing four years ago. I remembered my loneliness; I felt it with a defencelessness that I had denied myself at the time. Standing there with my groceries in hand, the intensity of the feelings took me by surprise.