LT

“Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can’t pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you’d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“The sound of a pen scratching in the night is a holy sound.”
― Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God

“Finally, if you attempt to read this without working through a significant number of exercises (see §0.0.1), I will come to your house and pummel you with [Gr-EGA] until you beg for mercy. It is important to not just have a vague sense of what is true, but to be able to actually get your hands dirty. As Mark Kisin has said, “You can wave your hands all you want, but it still won’t make you fly.”
― Ravi Vakil, Foundations of Algebraic Geometry

“And so all great books are written in dead languages. The passage of time erodes them, tests them, filters them until what limited them to their times have been striped away, leaving behind only what is eternal, universal, lasting: Humanity expressed in a single voice, Life embodied in a single soul. That core is self-translating, self-generating, self-renewing.”
― Ken Liu