Sharing an assignment with you

My creative writing professor assigned us to find two paragraphs from different sources that exemplified some of the best creative non-fiction we've ever read. My choices were from two books that I currently have with me at school. The first is an essay so it can be debated as to whether it is creative. I chose it because I think it's good philosophy and good writing. The author is currently my favorite philosopher and I wrote a critique of this essay last semester for my final paper in my philosophy and literature class. I found her theories to be quite applicable since her topic is "the good life" and her question is "What is the best way to live?" She compares the mediums of philosophy and literature for dealing with this question and believes that something vital has been lost by seperating these two. Ok, I will stop rambling on about philosophy; here is the quote.

"This is after all, the spirit in which much of great literature has been and is written and read. We do approach literature for play and for delight, for the exhilaration of following the dance of form and unraveling webs of textual connection. But one of the things that makes literature something deeper and more central for us than a complex game, deeper even than those games, for example chess and tennis, that move us to wonder by their complex beauty, is that it speaks like Strether. It speaks about us, about our lives and choices and emotions, about our social existence and totality of our connections. As Aristotle observed, it is deep, and conducive to out inquiry about how to live, because it does not simply (as history does) record that this or that event happened; it searches for patterns of possibility--of choice, and circumstance, and the interaction between choice and circumstance--that turn up in human lives with such a persistence that they must be regarded as our possibilities. And so our interest in literature becomes cognitive: an interest in finding out what possibilities (and tragic impossibilities) life offers to us, what hopes and fears for ourselves it underwrites or subverts." - from "Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory" by Martha Nussbaum

My second choice actually has two paragraphs from the same book because they are equally beautiful, I think, and though only separated by a page, I was too lazy to type up all of the connecting information.

"I have been wondering this summer why our love has seemed, deeper, tenderer than ever before. It's taken us twenty-five years, almost, but perhaps at last we are willing ot let each other be; as we are; two diametrically opposite human beings in many ways, which has often led to storminess. But I think we are both learning not to chafe at the other's particular isness. This is the best reason I can think of why ontology is my word for the summer.
A Russian priest, Father Anthony, told me, "To say to anyone 'I love you' is tantamount to saying 'You shall live forever.' "
I am slowly beginning to learn something about immortality."

"Suddenly I said, 'Hey, I think I know why astrology has such tremendous appeal. The year and month and day you are born matters. The very moment you are born matters. This gives people a sense of their own value as persons that the church hasn't been giving them.'
"Now," he said, "you're cooking with gas."
(My note: the previous section was just background for these wonderful lines coming next that as Anne says "thrill my soul".)
To matter in the scheme of the cosmos: this is better theology than all our sociology. It is, in fact, all that God has promised to us: that we matter. That he cares." - from A Circle of Quiet by Madeiline L'Engle

Let me know what you think of my reading choices!