"There is no more evanescent quality in an accomplished fact than its wonderfulness. Solicited incessantly by the considerations affecting its fears and desires, the human mind turns naturally away from the marvellous side of events."

- Conrad, Nostromo, 1904.

"I was as welcome as the flowers in May, once the crew knew that I was going across with them. A man who thinks he may have to be a hero is consoled by the thought that his friends may read about it."

- A.J. Liebling, Normandy Revisited, 1955.

- Giovanni Tiepolo, The Procession of the Trojan Horse Into Troy, 1760.

"So from now on history will be a matter of necessary adjustments to Earth’s biophysical reality. We will be deploying ever-more powerful technologies, and we may get better at understanding our problems and addressing them. We could very possibly build a sustainable civilization that shares the planet with the other animals, and gives all humans alive a chance at a fulfilled existence. This is what the combination of justice and science working on physical reality could do, if we were to successfully shove history that way.

So two possibilities exist at once and are in a kind of awful race: utopia or catastrophe are both possible from our current moment. The thing is, the catastrophes will be wide-ranging but not universal, and will play out over decades and centuries, and in those same decades we will be struggling to accommodate to whatever situation exists, to make the best of it, and even to make it better. So there will be an ongoing struggle."

- Kim Stanley Robinson, from this interview.

Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it’s wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn’t properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer’s ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elisabeth.

– Orson Welles, Everybody’s Shakespeare, 1934

From the remarkable futility closet

"A great recrudescence of obscurity embraced the boat. The sea in the gulf was as black as the clouds above....When his voice ceased, the enormous stillness, without light or sound, seemed to affect Decoud's senses like a powerful drug. He didn't know at times whether he were asleep or awake. Like a man lost in slumber, he heard nothing, he saw nothing. Even his hand held before his face did not exist for his eyes. The change from the agitation, the passions and the dangers, from the sights and sounds of the shore, was so complete that it would have resembled death had it not been for the survival of his thoughts. In this foretaste of eternal peace they floated vivid and light, like the unearthly clear dreams of earthly things that may haunt the souls freed by death from the misty atmosphere of regrets and hopes. Decoud shook himself, shuddered a bit, though the air that drifted past him was warm. He had the strangest sensation of his soul having just returned into his body from the circumambient darkness in which land, sea, sky, the mountains, and the rocks were as if they had not been."

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, 1904.