Katherine May > Quotes > Quote > Amanda liked it

“I always thought that my future self would have ranks of books like my professor, all of them read and understood, an achievement in the past tense that proved I had become something. I now see that this was not what she showed me. She offered me instead the act of knowing, rather than the static fact of the known, a lifetime of enquiry. I don't want to sit like a brooding hen on the nest of my past achievements. I want to keep on going deep into the uncertain act of making, to see the unknown world stretch out before me and to devote myself to exploring it.

So I begin again, just as I have before. I have learned to be grateful for these losses, painful and disorienting as they are. They make me small again. The next world is so tantalising, lying across a million unread pages, and in which I am nothing, nobody, new.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age