Honey Bee

“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

“For a bird, there are only two sorts of bird: their own sort, and those that are dangerous. No others exist. The rest are just harmless objects, like stones, or trees, or men when they are dead.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

“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

“He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”
― John Williams, Stoner