MaryAnn

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“Pain is slight if opinion has added nothing to it; ... in thinking it slight, you will make it slight. Everything depends on opinion. It is according to opinion that we suffer. A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.”
― Seneca

“Default settings—both in software and in our lives—are most helpful when we wouldn’t know where to begin otherwise. But that ignorance is temporary. We’ll always have default settings—shortcuts for making decisions, patterns of behaviors, and habits—but we don’t need to hold on to our original settings over time. When we have limited time, we don’t want to waste it on things that don’t move our goals forward. “Greatness,” as American historian James Harvey Robinson said, is “courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards.”
― Rad Wendzich, Your Default Settings: Adjust Your Autopilot to Build a More Stable and Impactful Life