Ien van Houten

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“if religious people are going to be blamed for all the intolerance, then non-religious people simply have no right to be intolerant themselves.”
― Tom Hilpert, Superior Justice

“British Columbia has been described as a banana republic, only with bigger bananas,”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed