Leah

“Mental illnesses are often seen as chronic and intractable forces that take over our lives, but I wonder how much the stories we tell about them, especially in the beginning, can shape their course.”
― Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

“Fungi are in between animals and plants. Their cell walls are made of chitin—a substance never found in plants—which makes them more like insects. In addition, they cannot photosynthesize and depend on organic connections with other living beings they can feed on.”
― Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World

“Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“What may be featureless to us, a waste of undifferentiated ocean, is for them rich with distinction and variety, a fissured and wrinkled landscape, dense in patches, thin in others, a rolling olfactory prairie of the desired and the desirable, mottled and unreliable, speckled with life, streaky with pleasures and dangers, marbled and flecked, its riches often hidden and always mobile, but filled with places that are pregnant with life and possibility.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us