"Shall I speak truly what I now see below? The World is all a carkass, smoak and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just Nothing."

“Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike”

“It is risky to order a boy not to do something; it immediately opens to him the adventure of doing it.”

“Some people would rather die than think.”

“God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”

Source : Laurence Sterne, Wilbur Lucius Cross, Elizabeth Draper, Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald (1904). “Life of Lawrence Sterne by Percy Fitzgerald”

“Mount the stallion of love and do not fear the path, love’s stallion knows the way exactly. With one leap, Love’s horse will carry you home.”

“There's also an immediacy to everything that has changed everybody's expectations. Now if I can't get a hold of somebody on their cell phone I'm, like, angry with them. And in my mind, all the things that I really value in terms of art, really good novels or films or comics, I know they all take a long, long time to create, and they take a lot of concentration and dedication...and I just feel like the training for that is becoming more and more rare when people are used to seeing things like YouTube clips, and being able to acquire things instantly.”

“I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.”

“I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.”

Source : Sarah Manguso (2012). “The Guardians: An Elegy”, p.37, Granta Books