Abigail Tan

“EMILY: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?— every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER: No.

The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“The Western States are nervous under the beginning change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more resting, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest, but if it is judged worthy by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.
In fine I have written my work not as an essay with which to win the applause of the moment but as a possession for all time.”
― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War