“He was not a saint. He could be as petty as anyone. But the thing that makes a good life isn’t constantly being saintly—it’s just continuing to do shit. We spend so much time waiting to start to live. He always went big—he never looked for permission to go big. He assumed that he could talk to anyone he wanted, and he was right, and it wasn’t because he was super-special-genius-boy, it was because he tried.” This article on Aaron Swartz.
“Generously, you ask what I do [at Harvard]. … I labor, and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories, and junk; I go to the math lib and read and go to the Phil lib and divide my time between [Bertrand] Russell and the contemplation of a most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza — charmingly ironic, at that, don’t you think?; I make stenches in three different labs, listen to Allard gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly to lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letter, and wish I were dead. Voila.” Oppenheimer writing home to his high school teacher and friend.
“There she is in a boat, in the breeze, having done, at 31, what she had set out to do at 6. I am tempted to leave her there, and leave you there with her on that boat, in that moment. Because who wouldn’t want to stay there, in a moment like that? But she is 31; she will die at 77, in 1995, of leukemia, in San Diego. And it will be too young. But there is so much life to live between this moment on that boat and the end. And though there will be no other moment like this one, where the world first learns her name, when the dream she’s fulfilled is so pure and so precise and easily understood and explained. There will be other moments and other dreams. There has to be, with so much life left to live.” The Memory Palace
“You got a lot of love in you. More than anybody I ever met. It’s burstin’ out of you. You take in the world in these big gulps and you can’t help but to let yourself get drowned in it. It overwhelms you. Makes you feel like you’re ready to explode at any minute. They don’t see it. I do. It’s the burden you carry.” Halt and Catch Fire
“Rebecca made clear, by concrete illustrations, by her own self, the two wholly different, wholly separate, forms of thought and mind, ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘narrative’ (in Bruner’s terminology). And though equally natural and native to the expanding human mind, the narrative comes first, has spiritual priority. Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost non-existent. It is this narrative or symbolic power which gives a sense of the world—a concrete reality in the imaginative form of symbol and story—when abstract thought can provide nothing at all. A child follows the Bible before he follows Euclid. Not because the Bible is simpler (the reverse might be said), but because it is cast in a symbolic and narrative mode.” The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
“If there is a soul, it is equal in all living things.” Don Hertzfeldt
“...every part of the surface, which during the day is seen as foam, now glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright...” Charles Darwin
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere.' I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?” Feynman Lectures
“After, we were all getting dressed to walk to the after-party. And the streets of New York were like a Hopper painting. The streetlights were putting up perfect little triangles of light. When we left there were hordes of people, because they were waiting for us. And everyone was wearing long gowns and monkey suits because they had just come from the play. We passed this one Korean fruit stand, and someone had taken one of those plastic milk crates and was standing on it, and they were in that triangle of light, and they were reading the review that had just come out. They were surrounded by a semicircle of the audience, and passersby on the street, and they were reading this paper loudly to this crowd of people. And every time they would read a good sentence, the crowd would cheer.” The World Only Spins Forward
“I’ve lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children – they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough. It’s so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.” Angels in America
“He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea.” A Little Life
“All the days seem like one. All the days have one color, yellow, like dessicated, hyper-heated sand, and there isn’t a shred of shade, nor a drop of water, and no end of the yellow sand.” We