Orion

“Yes, thought the Count, the world does spin. In fact, it spins on its axis even as it revolves around the sun. And the galaxy turns as well, a wheel within a greater wheel, producing a chime of an entirely different nature than that of a tiny hammer in a clock. And when that celestial chime sounds, perhaps a mirror will suddenly serve its truer purpose - revealing to a man not who he imagines himself to be, but who he has become.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“I have waxed poetic about the thrill of human interaction many times before, particularly as it applies to live music, because it takes us from the one-dimensional virtual experience to the three-dimensional tangible experience, ultimately reassuring us that this life is real and that we are not alone.”
― Dave Grohl, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music

“an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Each novel is a message in a bottle cast into the great ocean of literature from somewhere else (even if it was written and published last week in your home town); and what makes the novel available to its readers is not shared values or beliefs or experiences but the human capacity to conjure new worlds in the imagination. A fully realized novel provides readers with everything they need for their imaginations to go to work.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions