Verb conjugation has become muddled, as well. Which is correct:
"I am a neurosurgeon," "I was a neurosurgeon," or "I had been a neurosurgeon before and will be again"? Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection. So what tense am I living in now? Have I proceeded beyond the present tense and into the past perfect? The future tense seems vacant and, on others' lips, jarring.

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

It was passages like these, where there is a clear mocking of literalist readings of Scripture, that had brought me back around to Christianity after a long stretch, following college, when my notion of God and Jesus had grown, to put it gently, tenuous. During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos.
Surely Occam's razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

The outgoing intern who was supposed to orient me but instead just handed me a list of forty-three patients: "The only thing I have to tell you is: they can always hurt you more, but they can't stop the clock." And then he walked away.

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

Have we - we who have returned - been able to understand and make others understand our experience? What we commonly mean by ‘understand' coincides with ‘simplify’; without profound simplification the world around us would be an infinite, undefined tangle that would defy our ability to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions. In short, we are compelled to reduce the knowable to a schema: with this purpose in view we have built for ourselves admirable tools in the course of evolution, tools which are specifically the property of the human species - language and conceptual thought.

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

We also tend to simplify history; but the pattern within which events are ordered is not always identifiable in a single unequivocal fashion, and it may therefore happen that different historians understand and construe history in ways that are incompatible with one another. Nevertheless, perhaps for reasons that go back to our origins as social animals, the need to divide the field into 'we' and 'they' is so strong that this pattern, this bi-partition - friend-enemy - prevails over all others. Popular history, and also the history taught in schools, is influenced by this Manichean tendency which shuns half-tints and complexities: it is prone to reduce the river of human occurrences to conflicts, and the conflicts to duels - we and they, Athenians and Spartans, Romans and Carthaginians.

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured
Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world, the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again.

Jean Amery, as quoted by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved

Let us have done with vain regrets and longings for the days that never will be ours again. Our work lies in front, not behind us; and "Forward!" is our motto. Let us not sit with folded hands, gazing upon the past as if it were the building: it is but the foundation. Let us not waste heart and life, thinking of what might have been, and forgetting the maybe that lies before us. Opportunities flit by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.

Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift, as did the German Minnesingers, long before them, and the old Norse Saga writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece.
From all accounts, the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened to the public, for it is very pleasant even now, if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine, and take the rain good-temperedly.

Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

For everything looms pleasant through the softening haze of time. Even the sadness that is past seems sweet. Our boyish days look very merry to us now, all nutting, hoop, and ginger-bread. The snubbings and toothaches and the Latin verbs are all forgotten
—the Latin verbs especially. And we fancy we were very happy when we were hobbledehoys, and loved; and we wish that we could love again. We never think of the heartaches, or the sleepless nights, or the hot dryness of our throats, when she said she could never be anything to us but a sister-as if any man wanted more sisters!

Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Great ability is not required so much as little usefulness.
Brains are at a discount in the married state. There is no demand for them, no appreciation even. Our wives sum us up according to a standard of their own, in which brilliancy of intellect obtains no marks. Your lady and mistress is not at all impressed by your cleverness and talent, my dear reader-not in the slightest.

Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 was awarded to László Krasznahorkai "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art"

Simply, Virchow was a determinist. He believed that life could ultimately be reduced to a set of physical laws, like mechanics, and that man's reason could therefore someday penetrate and explain all its mysteries. Consequently, he regarded the course of human history as being one of overall enlightenment, and he desired both as a scientist and as a political thinker to be a part of that process, of finding out what was true and ridding from men's minds what wasn't.
Uyterhoeven, on the other hand, was a vitalist. He recognized life to be a fundamentally spontaneous and creative phenomenon, subject to no law beyond an apparently indomitable will to grow and to ex-pand. Physics and chemistry did well to record her habits, in other words, but provided no explanation as to the vital force which still evidently charged the universe.

Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden

Indeed, the pieces here speak of Eugene in tones of voice and turns of phrase that one would normally reserve for saints or prophets. And so it was this that compelled me to the rook with more and more determination, to the point where, I must admit, for the last several days of my journey it has become precisely what I had resolved it shouldn't—an outright destination, and so the distance between us a mere obstacle, a nuisance, a means best undertaken without attention, like the turning of a page.

Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden

When Sonja was done, she left Larkin his pad and pencils as usual, and went to bed herself. That night she had a dream that she and Gustav were looking at a house by the seaside which the water had flooded to its windowsills. In the morning she awoke later than normal and went to Larkin's room. She found his newest drawing on the nightstand, of a boy flying over London Bridge, but when she turned down his blanket to wake him, only his body was lying there.

Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden