DAVID McRoberts

“Only fools want to be great.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

“With every tightening of the screw, the tyrant makes our hope more precise. And nothing enrages a tyrant more than hope.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm: A Lyrical Meditation on Nature, Mortality, and the Sacred from Pulitzer Prize Winner Annie Dillard