Chris Stanford

“Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar/And what we have been makes us what we are.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“My friend Chip Ward speaks of “the tyranny of the quantifiable,” of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me