Frank Strada

“Only those who know the supremacy of intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing, soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Giacometti said, “The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“I would wish for my last day to involve an act of freedom - a walk by the ocean, a long bike ride, something I love. . . . Final acts acquire holiness. . . If finality makes something holy then every moment is holy, because every moment could be the last. . . . Live each day as if it's your last, we think, and then we don't.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

“The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel