| And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that never were. Rainer Maria Rilke |
| Poet, author; Letters to a Young Poet |
"An old truism holds that the pessimist sees the glass as half-empty while the optimist sees it as half-full. But active and engaged people don't bother to measure the contents of their cups. They savor what they've got, drink it down, then go looking for a refill. One name for this approach is meliorism. Meliorists want to make things better—to ameliorate them." — Andrew Fiala, The Fresno (California) Bee, 10 Nov. 2017
People aren’t cringing around strangers and crowds because of pre-existing senses of fear or loathing. Instead, many people in these times of COVID-19 are simultaneously learning a new emotional experience, neuroscientists and psychologists say. It’s normal—and we might work through it once we get through the pandemic, writes Philip Kiefer. “Feeling nauseous at the thought of a dish that once brought on a bout of food poisoning is essentially the same thing as the squickiness you may now experience when someone gets too close in a crowd.”
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| Arundhati Roy | |||
| Indian writer, novelist; from What Lies Ahead? |
