alex

“We see, as in the universes of the material kosmos, after meteorological, vegetable, and animal cycles, man at last arises, born through them, to prove them, concentrate them, to turn upon them with wonder and love -- to command them, adorn them, and carry them upward into superior realms -- so, out of the series of the preceding social and political universes, now arise these States. We see that while many were supposing things established and completed, really the grandest things always remain; and discover that the work of the New World is not ended, but only fairly begun”
― Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas and Other Papers

“The greatest happiness possible to a man ... is to become civilized, to know the pageant of the past, to love the beautiful, to have just ideas of values and proportions, and then retaining his animal spirits and appetites, to live in a wilderness, - J. Frank Dobie”
― Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind - REVISED EDITION

“His words were then these as followeth: Know all men, he said, time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions. What means this? Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation. Omnis cam ad te veniet”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I often meet people who do not like me or each other. It doesn’t always matter. I keep on smiling, talking. I knock at the same door once, three times, twelve. My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing. The same smile. I knew someone who used to go to sleep counting, not sheep, but people against whom he had grievances—bullies from childhood, kindergarten teachers, back to nannies even, bosses, employees, anybody awful up to the preceding day. When they were rounded up in his mind, he would machine-gun them down.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat