This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other wit… - Maria Popova

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.

We navigate the unknown frontiers of the social universe through a sextant of existing relationships — nearly every new person we meet is within only a few degrees of separation from someone we already know. But every once in a while, pure chance intercedes to remind us that whatever structures of control we may put into place, however much we may mistake the illusion of choice for the fact of choice, randomness is the reigning monarch of the universe.

When we encounter a person of exceptional intellectual and creative vitality, their magnetism can disorient the compass needle of admiration and attraction — it becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, to tease apart the desire to be with from the desire to be like.