Phenomenal Writing

A friend of mine lost the ability to form memories for a few days last week and it really hammered home that being in the present isn't all that great — it is the layering of the past onto the present that gives stuff meaning.

This makes me think: if having no memory robs the present of meaning, actively forming more memories should make life richer

It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important—and worth doing.

Steinbeck on the one story:

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one... Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil... There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chip

The pianist whose fingers seem supernaturally nimble, the presenter whose message seems viscerally compelling, and the artist whose paintings seem impossibly realistic all wield the same magic: they’ve invested more time than you’d expect.

He would again be as solitary as ever, and though he had great hopes, and great—too great—expectations from life, he could not have given any definite account of his hopes, his expectations, or even his desires.

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.

For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.

He was well aware of his own considerable abilities, and nervously exaggerated them in his self-conceit.

Trajan was ambitious of fame; and as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.