Cátia

“Books are the best type of influence of the past...Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar: Self-Reliance, Compensation

“They [human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“John Muir, Earth — planet, Universe

[Muir's home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal]”
― John Muir

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath