“The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. No least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident.”

— Theodore Dreiser , book The Financier

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. XXX

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Theodore Dreiser 20

Novelist, journalist 1871–1945

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“The American mind — the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western — likes to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny something that it takes for a fact; it has a conventional approach, a conventional analysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional expression, all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality.”

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“Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.”

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“… like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?”

Robin McKinley book The Blue Sword

Source: The Blue Sword

“Probably no agitation has ever attained the magnitude, either in the number of its recruits or the area of its influence, which has been attained by Modern Socialism, and at the same time been so little understood and so misunderstood, not only by the hostile and the indifferent, but by the friendly, and even by the great mass of its adherents themselves.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

¶ 1
State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherin They Differ (1888)
Context: Probably no agitation has ever attained the magnitude, either in the number of its recruits or the area of its influence, which has been attained by Modern Socialism, and at the same time been so little understood and so misunderstood, not only by the hostile and the indifferent, but by the friendly, and even by the great mass of its adherents themselves. This unfortunate and highly dangerous state of things is due partly to the fact that the human relationships which this movement — if anything so chaotic can be called a movement — aims to transform, involve no special class or classes, but literally all mankind; partly to the fact that these relationships are infinitely more varied and complex in their nature than those with which any special reform has ever been called upon to deal; and partly to the fact that the great moulding forces of society, the channels of information and enlightenment, are well-nigh exclusively under the control of those whose immediate pecuniary interests are antagonistic to the bottom claim of Socialism that labor should be put in possession of its own.

“I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

Epilogue, p. 328
My Country and My People (1935)

“It’s to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing ever happened, or so little, which never met with anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images.”

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) Irish novelist, playwright, and poet

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“Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 52 - 53
Context: Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless. To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future. Fate, Mr. Kung taught me, is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.

“The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too”

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Source: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“Life is not always perfect. Like a road, it has many bends, ups and down, but that’s its beauty.”

Amit Ray (1960) Indian author

World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird (2014) https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KkYtBgAAQBAJ,

“Don't you know I'm still standing, better than I ever did?
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid.
I'm still standing after all this time
Picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

I'm Still Standing
Song lyrics, Too Low for Zero (1983)

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