rowan

“Whatever became of the moment
when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words,out we come, bloodied and squalling...with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction
and time is its only measure.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“We are embedded in habit. We dread the truly new, the truly emergent. We don’t fear the end of the world—we fear the end of the world as we know it.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea