Laura Zhang

“I still had Grandma’s hankie in my pocket. The sun flared. I’d heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“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

“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