#eve

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything. ↗

— James Baldwin

#everything #instrument #ivory-tower #life #music

We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy. ↗

— Paul Hoffman

#baby #childe #cynic #cynicism #enemy

Everyone wants immediate success, immediate celebrity, and that doesn't produce what used to be artists. ↗

— Colin R. Davis

#celebrity #everyone #immediate #produce #success

Sometime the only way t' keep goin' is t' keep goin'. ↗

— Bodie Thoene

#life #persevering #life

So every single day, I found something to be grateful for and that's a powerful lesson. ↗

— Alice Barrett

#day #every #every single day #found #grateful

The ethics of reverence for life makes no distinction between higher and lower, more precious and less precious lives. It has good reasons for this omission. For what are we doing, when we establish hard and fast gradations in value between living organisms, but judging them in relation to ourselves, by whether they seem to stand closer to us or farther from us. This is a wholly subjective standard. How can we know what importance other living organisms have in themselves and in terms of the universe? ↗

— Albert Schweitzer

#life

Ah, God, Lys" he breathed, and she opened her eyes to look up at him. She was the love of his heart, his true partner in both work and life, and the idea of losing her to the violence of the world they lived in scared the living shit out of him. But her smile lit her eyes, her face, and he pushed the darkness away and let himself grin back at her like the damn fool that he was. This moment-now-was perfect, and he wasn't going to let his fears interfere. ↗

— Suzanne Brockmann

#happy-ever-after #love #marriage #romance #sam

All my life I've been surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, but I found I could always keep up by working hard. ↗

— Glenn Seaborg

#work #life

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky. ↗

— Anita Shreve

#flight #gravity #heart #life #physics

Events that are predestined require but little management. They manage themselves. They slip into place while we sleep, and suddenly we are aware that the thing we fear to attempt, is already accomplished. ↗

— Amelia Barr

#already #attempt #aware #events #fear