I. We QUOTES

1 " The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of
some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures--solitude, books and imagination--outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a rainy day. "

― Helen Keller , The Story of My Life

3 " This should never have happened, Brishen. We were unimportant, you and I. We weren't supposed to mean anything to anyone." " Woman of day," he said slowly. " You mean everything to me. "

5 " Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects - inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity - perhaps rarity most of all - combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury - one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way - as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick - to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age. "

― K.J. Bishop , The Etched City

7 " He sat and looked at her. “How is Mary Darling?”

“Fast asleep after playing and having a bath,” she said. “The nursery is lovely.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

“Rose and Annie are obviously practiced nursemaids, and what is even better, they seem to like Mary, and she them.”

He grunted. “It would take a hard heart to turn away from my Mary Darling.”

A smile curved the corners of her lips. “You didn’t seem too enamored of her when you first met.”

“She has a forceful personality, as do I. We just took a bit to get to know one another. "

― Elizabeth Hoyt , Scandalous Desires (Maiden Lane, #3)

9 " Day will move on and live his life. So will I. We will be okay. Someday, perhaps in the far and distant future, we'll find each other again. "

― Marie Lu , Champion (Legend, #3)