Jason Schneiderman, From "Staircase", You Are Here: Poetry In The Natural World

““Kings and lords come and go and leave nothing but statues in a desert, while a couple of young men tinkering in a workshop change the way the world works.””

— Lord Havelock Vetinari, The Truth, Discworld book 25

“You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.”

— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

Wild Geese, Mary Oliver

“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”

— Ilya Kaminsky, from “A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck,” Deaf Republic

“The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold… The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war between princes.” - Michel de Montaigne, Essais

“I don’t want to be threatening, just feared enough to never have to make a fist.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib, “Ode to Drake, Ending with Blood in a Field”

What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.

— Kaveh Akbar, from Martyr!

At the end of a relationship, it is the one who is not in love that makes the tender speeches.

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love (via the-book-diaries)

I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.

John Green