A good performance, like a human life, is a temporal affair—a process in time. It is good as a whole through being good in its parts, and through their good order to one another. It cannot be called good as a whole until it is finished. During the process all we can say of it, if we speak precisely, is that it is becoming good. The same is true of a whole human life. Just as the whole performance never exists at any one time, but is a process of becoming, so a human life is also a performance in time and a process of becoming. And just as the goodness that attaches to the performance as a whole does not attach to any of its parts, so the goodness of a human life as a whole belongs to it alone, and not to any of its parts or phases.

Mortimer J. Adler
Mortimer J. Adler (b. 1902), U.S. educator, philosopher. The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense, ch. 2, Holt (1970).

Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you’re beginning to live for a single aim—for self-development, or the discovery of cosmic truths—when all you’re really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate.

Margaret Anderson
Margaret Anderson (1886–1973), U.S. editor and memoirist. The Fiery Fountains, part 1 (1951).

For much of her life, Anderson moved around from city to city and home to home. Among the places where she lived were Chicago, New York, and Paris.

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino (1923–1985), Italian author, critic. lecture, delivered in Turin, Nov. 1969. “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” published in The Literature Machine (1987).

And whether it is Thursday, or the day is stormy,
With thunder and rain, or the birds attack each other,
We have rolled into another dream.

John Ashbery
John Ashbery (b. 1927), U.S. poet, critic. “Spring Day.”