"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

Sarah Manguso

#People Quotes #Empathy Quotes #Mastery Quotes

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
“The American people are smart. They've gotten sick of the predictable hyperpartisan talking points and canned anger.”
“The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses.”
“The theory that gravitational attraction is inversely proportional to the square of the distance leads by remorseless logic to the conclusion that the path of a planet should be an ellipse .... It is this logical thinking that is the real meat of the physical sciences. The social scientist keeps the skin and throws away the meat.... His theorems no more follow from his postulates than the hunches of a horse player follow logically from the latest racing news. The result is guesswork clad in long flowing robes of gobbledygook.”
“the power of radio is not that it speaks to millions, but that it speaks intimately and privately to each one of those millions.”
“Kauai is kind of my place where I go to get centered. Its always my place to come back and feel normal again.”
“I have a lot of watches that need to be kept wound, so if I take two of them on a trip, there's always one sitting around. And if it sits around for a day, then it'll stop working. And then you have to reset the time and date, which is annoying.”
“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

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