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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“‘Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been lost.’”
“‘. . . you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, . . .’”
Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles, and the first whispers of a new truth are not caught by those in need of ear trumpets.
Dante had said that the greatest sorrow was remembering past happiness, but Dante was wrong on that formulation—dead wrong, thought Lowell. There are no happinesses like our sad, regretful ones. Joy and sorrow were sisters, and very like each other too, as Holmes had said, or else both would not bring tears as they equally did.
Nothing that keeps thought out will ever be safe from thought!”
“‘You, my little girl, Are better than all the ballads/That ever were sung or said;/For ye are a living poem,/And all the rest are dead.’”
I confess that ‘do right though the heavens fall’ is an admirable precept until the heavens take you at your word.
am a pendulum with a very short range of oscillation.”
“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”
