Great and Terrible

“I was glad to have the opportunity, but now I am glad to be rid of it. The constant violence, or the impending threat of it, and the toll of seeing so many casualties, over time, has enveloped me in an environment that weighs as heavily as a wool shroud even on pleasant days. To be the tiller at the wheel of man's hatred for man should be a tour of duty, not a career. - Ashley Crandall”
― Chris Onstad

“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart.”
― Kwame Nkrumah

“Children are dying."
Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates