Daphne

“You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“Jernau Gurgeh,” the machine said, making a sighing noise, “a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you might imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it.” Gurgeh thought about this. “Can I lie?”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

“Jiko: "Surfer, wave, same thing."

"That's just stupid, " I said. " A surfer's a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?"

Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. "A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean. A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye.

Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being