Laura Zhang

“What you don’t realize is that we are a strange and forbidding species to wild animals. We fill them with fear. They avoid us as much as possible. It took centuries to still the fear in some pliable animals—domestication it’s called—but most cannot get over their fear, and I doubt they ever will.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Eventually, computers might outperform humans in the very fields that made Homo sapiens the ruler of the world: intelligence and communication. The process that began in the Euphrates valley 5,000 years ago, when Sumerian geeks outsourced data-processing from the human brain to a clay tablet, would culminate in Silicon Valley with the victory of the tablet. Humans might still be around, but they would no longer be able to make sense of the world. The new ruler of the world would be a long line of zeros and ones.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“But shouldn’t a man know everything, excel at a host of different activities, initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all its mysteries? Yet this man taught her nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing. He thought she was happy; and she resented him for that settled calm, that ponderous serenity, that very happiness which she herself brought him.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary