Quote of the Day (George Meredith, on The Plight of Those ‘Hot for Certainties’)

"Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!—
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!"—English poet-novelist George Meredith (1828-1909), Modern Love (1862)

The image accompanying this post shows Bette Davis and Olivia DeHavilland in the 1942 film adaptation of Ellen Glasgow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, In This Our Life—a title taken, as seen in the passage above, from this George Meredith poem.

Quote of the Day (Gelsey Kirkland, on Children and Uncertainty)

“Fortunately for children, the uncertainties of the present always give way to the enchanted possibilities of the future.” —American ballerina Gelsey Kirkland (with Greg Lawrence), Dancing on My Grave: An Autobiography (1986)

Quote of the Day (Rebecca Solnit, on Hope, Uncertainty and Action)

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what is may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”― Writer, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (1997)