When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.
Nobody knows what goes on between two hearts including, more often than not, the people in whose chests they beat.
Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love?
It is not cowardice but courage to acknowledge the superior role chance plays in steering the course of life, and at the same time to take responsibility for the margin of difference our personal choices do make within the parameters of chance.
Literature is the original Internet – every footnote, every citation, every allusion is essentially a hyperlink to another text, to another mind.
When we encounter a person of exceptional intellectual and creative vitality, their magnetism can disorient the compass needle of admiration and attraction – it becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, to tease apart the desire to be with from the desire to be like.
We are always harshest upon those foibles we see in others that we know bedevil our own natures – the ones that most gravely misbecome our self image – for blame is always easier than shame.
Throughout life, our habits, beliefs, and ideas evolve beyond recognition. Our physical and social environments change. Almost all of our cells are replaced. Yet we remain, to ourselves, “who” “we” “are.
I am driven by the yearning to learn how to live; how to lead a meaningful life; the fear of not having yet learned how to die.
Guilt is the flip side of prestige and they’re both horrible reasons to do something.
What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover’s full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?
Those marginalized for one aspect of their nature are bound to have sympathies with those marginalized for another, but no marginalized group moves to the center solely by its own efforts – such is the paradox of power. It takes a gravitational pull by those kindred to the cause who are already in relative positions of power or privilege.
Kepler knew what we habitually forget – that the locus of possibility expands when the unimaginable is imagined and then made real through systematic effort.
We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things.
There is no overstating the triumph of having remained motivated by beauty in taking down the ugliest malignancies of human nature’s grasp for power.
Beyond any human lifetime, and often within it, what is recorded is what is remembered, the records gradually displacing the actuality of lived events. And what is recorded is a fraction of what is thought, felt, acted out, lived – a fraction at best edited by the very act of its selection, at worst warped by rationalization or fictionalized by a deliberate retelling of reality.
Even the farthest seers can’t bend their gaze beyond their era’s horizon of possibility, but the horizon shifts with each incremental revolution as the human mind peers outward to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens. We sieve the world through the mesh of these certitudes, tautened by nature and culture, but every once in a while – whether by accident or conscious effort – the wire loosens and the kernel of revolution slips through.
Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life – the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd’s song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria.
Every voracious reader knows that there is no Dewey system for the Babel of the mind. You walk amid the labyrinthine stacks and ideas leap at you like dust bunnies drawn from the motes that cover a great many different books ready long ago.