Natalie

“In “Victorian Literature”, I taught George Eliot’s great novel Middlemarch. The younger group hated it: the characters in it made the wrong decisions and married the wrong people, and they themselves were never going to make such mistakes. The older group loved it: the characters in it made the wrong decisions and married the wrong people - it was just like real life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts

“It was a bad day when three or four men were not standing around the forge, listening to Samuel’s hammer and his talk. They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“So despite all the advances of neuroscience, all the fancy machines and illuminating insights, we still need our old, wet gray matter - the only place where emotion and reason come together and alchemize into what we call wisdom - to tell us how to act.”
― Sam Kean, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery

“Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence