I am done
with great things and big things
with great institutions and big
success.
And I am for
those tiny, invisible, molecular
moral forces
that work from individual to individual
through the crannies of the world
like so many rootlets
or like capillary oozing of
water
yet which , if you give them time
will rend
the hardest monuments of man’s
pride.
William James
from a letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman, June 7, 1899
reprinted and broken into lines by Pete Seeger and included in Robert Fulghum’s “Words I Wish I Wrote”
Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
— David Foster Wallace
Myriad Ways 