#possibilities

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. ↗

— Joan Didion

#possibilities #new-york-city

The more I protested about this ambiguity, the more Joanna pointed out to me that it was both a terrible and wonderful part of life: terrible because you can't count on anything for sure--like certain good health and no possibility of cancer; wonderful because no human being knows when another is going to die--no doctor can absolutely predict the outcome of a disease. The only thing that is certain is change. Joanna calls all of this 'delicious ambiguity.' 'Couldn't there be comfort and freedom in no one knowing the outcome of anything and all things being possible?' she asked. Was I convinced? Not completely. I still wanted to believe in magic thinking. But I was intrigued. ↗

— Gilda Radner

#honest #intriguing #possibilities #change

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities. ↗

— James Baldwin

#inexorable #life #limits #mysterious #need

Believing time is on our side is difficult because the lens of our lives is too narrowly focused. We see only what is in our direct view, whether trials or bliss. We hold so tightly to the positive experiences for fear we won’t have another just as good and those that are negative we hope will disappear. With our vision set to the crown of our nose, we miss being exposed to a world of possibility lying in the vastness of our periphery. ↗

— Tina Leigh

#time #time-on-our-side #experience

I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities. ↗

— Ken Burns

#accurate #democracy #film #future #i

God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality. ↗

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

#limits #lives #meanings #mortality #our

For future exploration, when we have the objective of going to the Moon, it is important to have several possibilities to go there, and within this framework of cooperation to have our own access to orbit around the Moon. ↗

— Alain-Fournier

#around #cooperation #exploration #framework #future

The possibilities were endless. Battles would be fought. Wonders revealed. Many journeys. Many lands. Many joys. Many sorrows. But stories all... ↗

— William Joyce

#imagination #journeys #joy #lands #nicholas-st-north

The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity. ↗

— Nicholas Mosley

#alive #cell #continually #identity #impossibilities

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#dissatisfaction #modern-age #possibilities #wealth #age