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“The furies are at home
in the mirror; it is their address.
Even the clearest water,
if deep enough can drown.
Never think to surprise them.
Your face approaching ever
so friendly is the white flag
they ignore. There is no truce

with the furies. A mirror’s temperature
is always at zero. It is ice
in the veins. Its camera
is an X—ray. It is a chalice

held out to you in
silent communion, where gaspingly
you partake of a shifting
identity never your own.”
― R. S. Thomas

“A simpler way of putting it might be to say that ‘civilisation is incommunicable’ across both time and space, historically and, in the present, geographically. ‘No value can survive beyond the civilisation that produced it. Values are perishable, there are no absolute truths; every truth is relative to the context of the civilisation that posits it, and when the latter is exhausted, the concept of truth also crumbles, shatters.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“A child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth”
― African Proverb

“In the mountains they saw deer in the headlights and in the headlights the deer were pale as ghosts and as soundless. They turned their red eyes toward this unreckoned sun and sidled and grouped and leapt the bar ditch by ones and twos. A small doe lost her footing on the macadam and scrabbled wildly and sank onto her hindquarters and rose again and vanished with the others into the chaparral beyond the roadside.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain