“There is an oft-quoted passage in Walden, in which Thoreau exhorts us to find our pole star and to follow it unwaveringly as would a sailor or a fugitive slave. It’s a thrilling sentiment – one so obviously worthy of our aspirations. But even if you had the discipline to maintain the true course, the real problem, it has always seemed to me, is how to know in which part of the heaven your star resides.”
– Amor Towles,
Rules of Civility, p.230
“Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.“
– John Anthony Ciardi