“Here we are, probably the most educated generation in history, and somewhere along the line it’s like we never figured out what we were supposed to do with all the stuff we know. If they’d told me that it’s basically about being able to get a good job, I think I would have said, ‘That’s it? A job? You mean maybe I ought to learn how to do something I can get paid for.’
John Lescroart
The Fall
“Silence is a strange thing to us who live: we desire it, we fear it, we worship it, we hate it. There is a divinity about cats, as long as they are silent: the silence of swans gives them an air of legend.”
Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”
Mary McCarthy, “The Vita Activa”, The New Yorker, October 18, 1958
“It’s also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that’s sitting right here right now … with its aches and its pleasures … is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive.”
Pema Chodron
“I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weakness. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose.”
Simone Weil, Waiting for God
