"We sleepwalk through most of lives...and...every once in a while something happens...outside ourselves that forces us to pay attention in a new way, or something happens inside us that enables us to pay attention in a new way. And we suddenly realize that the world is so much richer, and more magnificent, and more wonderful than we had felt for a long time. Not to sentimentalize..., but I think children live much more continuously in a state of awareness of the miraculousness of existence."
Scott Russell Sanders

"It is the very extent of human life, the infinite number of things contained in it, its contradictory and fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the hours, months, years spend in one fond pursuit after another [that], baffling the grasp of our actual perception, make it slide from our memory...What canvas would be big enough to hold its striking groups, its endless subjects!...What a huge heap, a "huge, dumb heap," of wishes, thoughts, feelings, anxious cares, soothing hopes, loves, joys, friendships, it is composed of! How many ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep and intense, often pass through the mind in oly one day's thinking or reading, for instance!"
William Hazlitt