Sten Maulsby

“...a fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Мастер и Маргарита

“Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.”
― Barry Lopez

“The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“All these cousins can start a sentence in one language and finish it in another. They need these languages as the family travels to Odessa, to St. Petersburg, to Berlin and Frankfort and Paris. They also need these languages as they are denominators of class. With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home everywhere.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss