Stephen

“I think you grow up twice, The first time happens automatically. Everyone passes from childhood to adulthood, and this transition is marked as much by the moment when the weight of the world overshadows the wonder of the world as it is by the passage of years. Usually you don't get to choose when it happens. But if the triumph of this weight over wonder makes the first passage into adulthood, the second is the rediscovery of that wonder despite sickness, evil, fear, sadness, suffering-despite everything. And this second passage doesn't happen on its own. It's a choice, not an inevitability. It is something you have to deliberately find, and value, and protect.And you can't just do it once and keep it forever. You have to keep looking.”
― Nate Staniforth, Here Is Real Magic: A Magician's Search for Wonder in the Modern World

“Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Who are you then?"
"I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part