“Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.”

"Shades of Scarlett Conquering" from The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Songs

Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899) http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/memoirs/memoirstoc.html Part IV, Sect. 3 http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/memoirs/memoirs4_3.html
Context: Belief in an ice-cap reaching Middle Europe was at that time rank heresy; but before my eyes a grand picture was rising, and I wanted to draw it, with the thousands of details I saw in it; to use it as a key to the present distribution of floras and faunas; to open new horizons for geology and physical geography.
But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? From somebody's mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low.
Knowledge is an immense power. Man must know. But we already know much! What if that knowledge — and only that — should become the possession of all? Would not science itself progress in leaps, and cause mankind to make strides in production, invention, and social creation, of which we are hardly in a condition now to measure the speed?

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/473706394009759744]
Tweets by year, 2014

How I Write: John Banville on ‘Ancient Light,’ Nabokov, and Dublin (2012)

Source: The Iron Trial

Pt. I, lines 197–199. Compare Knolles, History (under a portrait of Mustapha I): "Greatnesse on Goodnesse loves to slide, not stand,/ And leaves, for Fortune’s ice, Vertue’s ferme land".
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)