The limitation in our ability ...

The limitation in our ability to perceive broad distinctions in scope can be applied to our moral and temporal responses.... We agonize over a dinner menu, or have engine trouble on the way to work; and for seconds or minutes our cosmos shrinks to a miniscule volume of being, an epic of cheese sauces or tragedy of fanbelts.
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 Robert Grudin

Quotes from the same author

We commonly think of freedom as the ability to define alternatives and choose between them. The creative mind exceeds this liberty in being able to redefine itself and reality at large, generating whole new sets of alternatives.
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 Robert Grudin
The happy individual is able to renew daily and with full consciousness all the basic expressions of human identity: work, love, communication, play, and rest.
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 Robert Grudin
At pains to define liberty, that most resolute of indefinables, our minds fall back on spatial images; on birds, sailboats, and mountains; the untethered balloon, the blue sky, the nude figure.
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 Robert Grudin
True intimacy is a human constant. People of all types find it equally hard to achieve, equally precious to hold. Age, education, social status, make little difference here; even genius does not presuppose the talent to reveal one's self completely and completely absorb one's self in another personality. Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together to attention and release of energy.
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 Robert Grudin
Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character.
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 Robert Grudin