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.

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.

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

If I seem so happy to you, you could never say anything that would please me so much. For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.’

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

Oh! he understood that for the humble soul of the Russian peasant, worn out by grief and toil, and still more by the everlasting injustice and everlasting sin, his own and the world’s, it was the greatest need and comfort to find some one or something holy to fall down before and worship.

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 th

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 bro