Jonathan

“The swift is sky-suited like no other bird. Weighing less than a hen's egg, with wings like a scythe and a tail like a fork, it eats and sleeps on the wing. They gather nesting material only from what's in the air, which means that there have been accounts of still-flapping butterflies wedged in among the leaves and twigs. They mate in brief mid-sky collisions, the only birds to do so, and to wash they hunt down clouds and fly through gentle rain, slowly, wings outstretched.”
― Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure

“Over a third of humanity, and almost 80 percent of North Americans, can no longer see the Milky Way. "The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow from the nearest strip mall depresses me no end," vision scientist Sonke Johnsen once wrote.

[…] Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection. It detaches us from the cosmos. It drowns out the stimuli that link animals to their surroundings and to each other. In making the planet brighter and louder, we have also fragmented it. While razing rainforests and bleaching coral reefs, we have also endangered sensory environments. That must now change. We have to save the quiet, and preserve the dark.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“We are Noah's Ark in reverse: it is as if we are raging through the bowels of the boat, setting fire to the stables, poisoning the water. Faced with such destruction at such pace, acquiescence becomes impossible. The time to fight, with all our ingenuity and tenacity and love and fury, is now.”
― Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure

“Sofie arrives a few hours later. She finds it in herself to stroke her dead father's hair. Standing there, her mind is blank. If anything, it is a sea, an endlessness of translucent molluscs.

Then she exchanges a few words with a nurse. About what came before, about the death, how it happened, and a little more about the practicalities at hand, where her father will be moved, and how long he can stay there.

Something plunges through her, streaming out in her wake as she shuts the door and leaves her father on the bed.”
― Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant