Figuring

by Maria Popova

The soldier drops, sinks like a wave—but the ranks of the ocean eternally press on. Death does its work, obliterates a hundred, a thousand—President, general, captain, private—but the Nation is immortal.

There was the emotion over what had occurred, and there was also the emotion of knowing that thousands of people, millions of people, maybe all the people in the world, were feeling great emotion over what was occurring.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

The day of the assassination plunged Casals, who had lived through two world wars and gruesome dictatorial violence, into an abyss of darkness he had never experienced, for he saw in the particular loss an ugliness reflecting on the whole of humanity.

a seven-year-old Chinese-born, French-raised cellist by the name of Yo-Yo Ma, who performed a 150-year-old concertino by Jean-Baptiste Bréval alongside his eleven-year-old sister, Yeou-Cheng, on the piano.

I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.

“White hyacinths for my soul,” she told Dorothy.

S. Buck—the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature—and the poet Marianne Moore, with whom Carson had shared a National Book Award table a decade earlier.

“No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone,” Adrienne Rich would write. “The accidents happen.”

The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty.