Honey Bee

“We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy. For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“In the week following the meeting in St. Peter’s, Lou became ever more fascinated by Nietzsche. She saw him as one who wore his mask awkwardly. It was obvious to her that he was playing a part so as to fit into the world. He was like some god who had come out of the wilderness and down from the high places, and put on a suit in order to pass among men. The visage of the god must be masked, lest men die faced with his dazzling glance. It allowed her to reflect that she herself had never worn a mask, never felt the need of one in order to be understood. She interpreted his mask as placatory, as springing from his goodness and pity toward other people. She quoted his aphorism, 'People who think deeply feel themselves to be comedians in their relationship with others because they first have to simulate a surface in order to be understood.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche

“Nietzsche specifically chooses the French word ressentiment to describe the foundation of slave morality. Ressentiment is a word with a fuller meaning than mere resentment and jealousy. It is a neurosis, a need to inflict pain upon the self as well as upon the other. Ressentiment encompasses the position of the resentful powerless who lack (or enjoy the lack of) the means to purge their resentment by taking revenge. And so, ressentiment led the slaves to lie their weakness into strength, to “take revenge on Rome and its noble and frivolous tolerance” by overturning the previous morality of power and superiority, and replacing it with the moral superiority of victimhood and the glorification of the downtrodden.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche