Man Walks Into a Room

He wouldn’t simply allow things to happen to him anymore.  He was alive, and for the first time since he’d woken out of the slumber of his past life, he felt it.  It was not that he was painfully aware of each moment, as he had been upon waking from the operation.  It seemed to him now that it was probably only the dying who saw the world with such precise and formal clarity as that, knowing it was already lost to them.  No, this was something different, as if at some point in the hazy bacchanal of the night he had been handed back his life.  A moment of reprieve, his heart bursting with a high-spirited hope, hammering it’s percussion in his chest.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

William Hazlitt

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.

Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

I was beginning to enjoy the sun again, the mountains, even life’s problems, I was beginning to accept that the meaninglessness of life was no one’s fault but mine. I wanted to…feel hatred and love, despair and tedium, all those simple, foolish things that make up everyday life, but which give pleasure to your existence. If one day I could get out of here, I would allow myself to be mad, because everyone is, indeed, the maddest are the ones who don’t know they’re mad, but keep repeating what others tell them to.

Sylvia Plath's Journals

Writing makes me a small God: I re-create the flux and smash of the world through the small ordered word patterns I make. I have powerful physical, intellectual and emotional forces which must have outlets, creative, or they turn to destruction and waste.

George Bernard Shaw

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan

Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.