Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him — the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he… - Doris Kearns Goodwin

We do not have to become heroes overnight,” Eleanor once wrote. “Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.

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.

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.