Applelimeade

“I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“All that land was just for the wheat, and the wheat was just for the flour. My bread had other ingredients, and all the other breads had still more, salts and yeasts and seeds and nuts and chemicals and additives harvested in laboratories and manufactured in factories. People worked in all those places, making all those ingredients and mixing them together to make bread, and someone made the label and the sack and the bag and the basket. Someone had loaded a truck, and driven it to town to be unloaded, and someone had arranged all the loaves in the supermarket, all to bring me this loaf of bread I would buy for a pittance, a word which here means “hardly any money.” This pittance, of course, would be split among the grocers and the farmers and the label makers and all of the people I had imagined, plus all of the people I hadn’t imagined and would never imagine. Surely it was not enough money for everybody. Surely someone was not getting enough money. I could imagine them living in poverty, maybe even starving, and yet there was so much bread, right here, they might eat. The whole story was bewildering, and perhaps even cruel, and yet I did not want it to end. I did not want the supermarket to close down and stop selling its abundance. I liked this bread.”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast

“I tell myself that it matters, and that the relics of my life will miss me. Sometimes I believe it.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“In the long scheme of things," she says, "we are but temporary inhabitants of this world, dirt and ash, recycled stardust."
"But in death, we become memory," Damien says. "In grief, we're made permanent.”
― Brendan Shay Basham