After ministering each day to the hundreds of young men who had endured ghastly wounds, submitted to amputations without anesthesia, and often died w… - Doris Kearns Goodwin

Walt Whitman, who worked as a nurse in the hospital wards, that the harrowing experience made one’s “little cares and difficulties” disappear “into nothing.

As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.

My reading was always a kind of living,” he explained later, “a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come to know well and sometimes be friends with.