Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without so much a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

Jacob Riis

&

Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend, ourselves to make a Couch — for whom?

Omar Khayyám

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Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen
C, Tom McCarthy]