Joel Nisson

“Interestingly, Jesus’s last supper was the Jewish Passover meal, which according to the Gospel accounts Jesus shared with his disciples just before his crucifixion. In Jewish tradition, the whole purpose of the Passover meal is to create and reenact artificial memories. Every year Jewish families sit together on the eve of Passover to eat and reminisce about “their” exodus from Egypt. They are supposed not only to tell the story of how the descendants of Jacob escaped slavery in Egypt but to remember how they personally suffered at the hands of the Egyptians, how they personally saw the sea part, and how they personally received the Ten Commandments from Jehovah at Mount Sinai.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The Inquisitors’ attack on her was rather like a pile of firewood condemning a life-giving fire in winter for not being unburned wood.”
― David James Duncan, Sun House

“Whatever the past may have handed on to us, it is up to each one of us to chisel our present out of the shapeless block of the future.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“Tom wrote secret poetry, and in those days it was only sensible to keep it secret. The poets were pale emasculates, and Western men held them in contempt. Poetry was a symptom of weakness, of degeneracy and decay. To read it was to court catcalls. To write it was to be suspected and ostracized. Poetry was a secret vice, and properly so. No one knows whether Tom’s poetry was any good or not, for he showed it to only one person, and before he died he burned every word. From the ashes in the stove there must have been a great deal of it.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden by John Steinbeck: A Timeless Tale of Family, Free Will, and the Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil