“When the chorus sing that the ‘name of the land will vanish’ and ‘Troy no longer exists’, they are singing for an audience for whom Troy’s name has survived.”
— P.E. Easterling on Euripides’s Trojan Woman, from ‘Form and Performance in Greek Tragedy’, The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
— Carl Jung
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch
“A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March”
— Brutus, Julius Caesar (1953)
“A bell cannot tell time, but it can be moved in just such a way as to say twelve o’clock—similarly, a man cannot calculate infinite numbers, but he can be moved in just such a way as to say pi.”
― Daniel Tammet, Thinking in Numbers: How Maths Illuminates Our Lives
“when i say i, i mean us
but i’m not sure it’s my place to talk for you”
“Our anger was a fury sparked by profound injustices. Wrongs that deserved ire. And with that rage, we ripped a hole in the status quo.”
― Judith Heumann, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist
“When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.”
— Vietnamese proverb
Thoreau always had two notebooks—one for facts, and the other for poetry. But he had a hard time keeping them apart, as he often found facts more poetic than his poems. They are, he said, translated from the language of the earth into that of the sky. Thoreau knew that the imagination uses facts to fabricate images and even delicate architectures. One summer night, looking up into the sky at a particularly beautiful, scintillating star, he thought perhaps another traveler somewhere else along the coast was, like him, looking up at that same star and said, ‘Of what unsuspected triangles are stars the apex?’”
— Jean Frémon, “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Gloves”
“What you pretend to be is so complicated that I don’t even bother to try to understand it.”
― Miguel Ruiz, The Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery
Lisa Marie Blair 