“But really, Marilla, one can’t stay sad very long in such an interesting world, can one?”

Anne in Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Of the things that frighten us, the fear of being left out of the flow of human interaction is certainly one of the worst… In many preliterate cultures solitude is thought to be so intolerable that a person makes a great effort never to be alone; only witches and shamans feel comfortable spending time by themselves…. The Latin locution for ‘being alive’ was inter hominem esse, which literally meant ‘to be among men’; whereas ‘to be dead’ was inter hominem esse desinere, or ‘to cease to be among men.’”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Vilfredo Pareto… developed a logarithmic pattern that demonstrated that, typically, only 20 per cent of people controlled 80 per cent of a country’s wealth. Later, American economist Max Lorenz observed that Pareto’s principle, often called the 80/20 rule, could be applied broadly to other areas, such as productivity (20 per cent of employees do 80 per cent of the work) and machinery management (20 per cent of machines are responsible for 80 per cent of breakdowns).”

Marnie Ko in Western Standard September 27, 2004

In my latest National Post column I express gratitude for all the things that make me happy normally and are now helping me through the quarantine including (my life is so interesting words may fail you here) a brilliantly designed new power bar protecting my vital computer lifeline to the world.

“I laid her life out on her desk like a losing hand of solitaire…”

The narrator in Spider Robinson Time Travelers Strictly Cash (he's going through a woman's personal documents)

“Men are not so interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time it would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape.”

G.K. Chesterton in The Defendant (1901), quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #6 Issue 15 (April-May 1999)

“William James used to say that there was not much difference between one man and another but that the little difference there was was of great importance.”

Richard Hofstadter The American Political Tradition (author's 1967 Preface)

“Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.”

Judge (Billings) Learned Hand in “On Receiving an Honorary Degree” (1939) quoted on en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Learned_Hand