Terence

“The reason we read - the reason you're reading this book - is because some other book enchanted you, earlier on, and before that another, and before that another. This is the real literary canon, not some hegemonic pantheon, adapted and debated over time. We each have one, a literary canon, and we make it ourselves, not out of what is respectable or prestigious or prominent or lasting or moral or even well-made.”
― Daniel Handler, And Then? And Then? What Else?

“An old man says to his grandson: 'There's a fight going on inside me. It's a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil - angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good - peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you and inside every other person, too.' After a moment, the boy asks, 'Which wolf will win?' The old man smiles. 'The one you feed.”
― New York Review of Books

“[H]uman relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time pulling away frm them.”
― Willa Cather

“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around.”
― James Baldwin