Randall Needham

“Men had reached into the scrub and along its boundaries, had snatched what they could get and had gone away, uneasy in that vast indifferent peace; for a man was nothing, crawling ant-like among the myrtle bushes under the pines. Now they were gone, it was as though they had never been. The silence of the scrub was primordial. The wood-thrush crying across it might have been the first bird in the world—or the last.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, South Moon Under

“The craggy lines that made up the character in his face now seemed like scars of defeat, inflicted on him over time.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Keen intelligence is two-edged,” Master once remarked in reference to Kumar’s brilliant mind. “It may be used constructively or destructively, like a knife, either to cut the boil of ignorance, or to decapitate oneself. Intelligence is rightly guided only after the mind has acknowledged the inescapability of spiritual law.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“Philip had arguably created the first nation-state in Europe, with a population of perhaps a million. He would next create Europe’s first empire.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece