"Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only "for a time"? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expand… - Maria Popova

"Margaret Fuller wondered whether she was "fitted to be loved" — a word choice both curious and tragic: not "worthy," bespeaking an inherent endowment, but "fitted," as if she could fit herself for love by strain and discipline. With Caroline, with Sam, and now with Waldo, she had pushed and pushed to earn the affection she longed for — a push that eventually repelled each of its objects. But she could hardly have compartmentalized her nature — the very nature by which she had reached the stratospheric heights of her achievement. Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life — the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd's song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria."

Unlike the prose of letters, pinned to the physical and emotional reality of the present, in poetry the imagination is allowed to travel between fact and fantasy, to traverse present, past, and future, so that the reader, and perhaps even the writer, is never quite sure — nor need ever ask — to what extent the images evoked correspond to the intersection of matter and moment we call reality.

What invigorated Maria Mitchell that evening, and what would drive her for the remaining decades of her life, was not the king’s medal, nor the luster of worldwide recognition, but the sheer thrill of discovery — the ecstasy of having personally chipped a small fragment of knowledge from the immense monolith of the unknown, that elemental motive force of every sincere scientist.