In spite of Fate, the marvelous abundance
of being, like the brimming land
or like stone figures
built into gateways, bearing up balconies.

Or a bronze bell, lifting its voice
over and over against the dullness of our days.
Or that single column in Karnak, standing
long after the temple fell.

Today this extravagance flashes by
in the blur of our haste,
out of the wide yellow day into the vaulted night.

In that rush it dissolves, leaving nothing behind,
just as a plane overhead makes no mark on the sky.
Only our minds see the curve of its flight.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 22

The school bus picks us up first so we claim the back seats. Make the white kids sit up front.

— Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz, Hint Fiction

Vainglory and curiosity are the two scourges of our soul. The latter leads us to thrust our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.

— Montaigne

It is dangerous and presumptuous, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend.

— Montaigne

Retail. Thirty-nine hours a week for eighteen years, she says, proud. Like she’s a survivor of rape and she knows it.

— Kelly Spitzer, Hint Fiction

She loved to steal spoons. She didn’t need them; she just enjoyed having a hundred tiny silver mirrors to see what no one else could.

— Ty Miller, Hint Fiction

The old cat blinked once, focused. Then was lost to her forever.

— Jack Ketchum, Hint Fiction

That morning he was weightless. At the station, he smelled ash. Later, reaching for dust-caked limbs, he floated away, squinting against the sky’s brilliance.

— Michael Kelly, Hint Fiction

“The king died and then the queen died” is a story.

“The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.

— E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Before parting from life of my free will and in my right mind, I am impelled to fulfill a last obligation: to give heartfelt thanks to this wonderful land of Brazil which afforded me and my work such kind and hospitable repose. My love f0r the country increased from day to day, and nowhere else would I have preferred to build up a new existence, the world of my own language having disappeared for me and my spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself.

But after one’s sixtieth year unusual powers are needed in order to make another wholly new beginning. Those that I possess have been exhausted by long years of homeless wandering. So I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labor meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on earth.

I salute all my friends! May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.

— Stefan Zweig’s suicide note, February 23, 1942

Our being is cemented with sickly qualities . . . Whoever should remove the seeds of these qualities from man would destroy the fundamental conditions of our life.

— Montaigne

Here is a “you” in which my “I” is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished.

— Stefan Zweig on reading Montaigne’s Essays

takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shews us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many-colored scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.

— William Hazlitt

No prison has received me, not even for a visit. Imagination makes the sight of one, even from the outside, unpleasant to me. I am so sick for freedom, that if anyone should forbid me access to some corner of the Indies, I should live distinctly less comfortably.

— Montaigne

I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself . . . I roll about in myself.

— Montaigne