Brendan Ford

“It was perhaps the very extremity of these well-deserved claims that should have given us pause, for if an art has indeed been carried to its richest expression, then we may wonder whether the urge that impelled it in the direction of its fulfillment may not impel it beyond its proper limit. In this sense we may ask whether the highest form of an art contains within it the elements of its own destruction—whether decadence, in short, so far from being the sickly opposite of art’s deepest health, is perhaps nothing but the result of an urge identical to both.”
― Steven Millhauser, The Knife Thrower and Other Stories

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.”
― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat