Taylor Eisenhauer

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
― Meg Shaffer, The Wishing Game

“No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.”
― Douglas Preston, The Lost City of the Monkey God

“The women had a story to tell, even if the world wasn't quite yet ready to hear it, and their story began with three simple words. We were there.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Women

“I would ask the reader to pause for a moment and ponder the statistics. Statistics are mere numbers; they need to be translated into human experience. What would a 90 percent mortality rate mean to the survivors and their society? The Black Death in Europe at its worst carried off 30 to 60 percent of the population. That was devastating enough. But the mortality rate wasn’t high enough to destroy European civilization. A 90 percent mortality rate is high enough: It does not just kill people; it annihilates societies; it destroys languages, religions, histories, and cultures. It chokes off the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The survivors are deprived of that vital human connection to their past; they are robbed of their stories, their music and dance, their spiritual practices and beliefs—they are stripped of their very identity.”
― Douglas Preston, The Lost City of the Monkey God