Connie Shulick

“No one mentioned such things; it was not a rule, but was considered rude to call attention to things that were unsettling or different about individuals.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“It is a Law of Nature with us that a male child shall have one more side than his father, so that each generation shall rise (as a rule) one step in the scale of development and nobility. Thus the son of a Square is a Pentagon; the son of a Pentagon, a Hexagon; and so on.”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“... this little planet of ours has much to offer...’ ‘... or have you always known?”
― Trevor Alan Foris, The Octunnumi Fosbit Files Prologue

“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think…Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy