What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there’s no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.

Upgrade, Blake Crouch

“Most people,” [The Old Man] had said, “go through life looking and never see a thing. Anything you see is interesting, from a chinch bug to a barnacle, if you just look at it and wonder about it a little.” Then he would send me to the swamps or out in the boat or off along the beach with a firm command to look and tell him later what I saw. I saw plenty and in detail, whether it was ants working or a mink swimming or a tumblebug endlessly pushing its ball.

The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older, Robert Ruark

“Losing faith in your own willfulness and capacity to act, you eventually lose freedom,” noted an early critic of victim culture. “That was one lesson of totalitarianism, which succeeded by organizing masses of the disaffected, politically inactive, self-centered people who felt helpless and victimized, believed that they didn’t matter and sought ‘self-abandonment’ in the state.”

San Fransicko: Why Progressive Policies Ruin Cities, Michael Shellenberger