Phenomenal Writing

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.

“This boulevard is never much frequented; and now, at two o’clock, in the stifling heat, it was quite deserted.”

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

His nervous shudder had passed into a fever that made him feel shivering; in spite of the heat he felt cold. With a kind of effort he began almost unconsciously, from some inner necessity, to stare at all the objects before him, as though looking for something to distract his attention; but he did not succeed, and kept lapsing every moment into

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

The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle, the plaster, the scaffolding, the bricks and the dust all around him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to everyone who is unable to get out of town during the summer—all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The unbearable stench from

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