in focus
“Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.”
— Margaret Fuller, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli
“Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.”
— Margaret Fuller, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli
“Our minds must have relaxation: rested, they will rise up better and keener. Just as we must not force fertile fields (for uninterrupted production will quickly exhaust them), so continual labor will break the power of our minds.”
— Seneca, On Tranquility of the Mind
“You are still, as you ever were, lovely, beautiful beyond expression.”
— Mary Shelley, from “Mathilda,” originally published c. October 1812
“Wherever you are, light of my life, I want you to feel on your skin the same quiver, the same heat, the intensity that I feel.”
—
José María Álvarez, tr. by Risa M. Hazel, from “On Time’s Fugacity,”
“Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. […] You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of levels, levels of perception, of false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, in an interview with Peter Duval Smith (1962)
“She was graceful, with a grace that rested in the blood,”
— Octavio Paz, from Convergences: Essays; “Remember That Voice,”
