“I think you grow up twice, The first time happens automatically. Everyone passes from childhood to adulthood, and this transition is marked as much by the moment when the weight of the world overshadows the wonder of the world as it is by the passage of years. Usually you don't get to choose when it happens. But if the triumph of this weight over wonder makes the first passage into adulthood, the second is the rediscovery of that wonder despite sickness, evil, fear, sadness, suffering-despite everything. And this second passage doesn't happen on its own. It's a choice, not an inevitability. It is something you have to deliberately find, and value, and protect.And you can't just do it once and keep it forever. You have to keep looking.”
― Here Is Real Magic: A Magician's Search for Wonder in the Modern World
― Here Is Real Magic: A Magician's Search for Wonder in the Modern World
“Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.”
― Island
― Island
“I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.”
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“In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don't get anywhere by not 'wasting' time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”
― Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
― Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
“Who are you then?"
"I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”
― Faust, First Part
"I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”
― Faust, First Part
Stephen’s 2025 Year in Books
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