Annie

“There are some ten thousand extant religious sects--each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong but are instruments of evil, besides. None of the ten thousand has yet persuaded me to make the requisite leap of faith. In the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain--which doesn't strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

“I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Instead, he described the way the sun set in the valley of Apan: first rich golden, deepening to amber, and then, with a swift, sure strike, night overtook the sun like the extinguishing of a candle. The darkness in the valley was so deep it was almost blue, and when thunderstorms slinked over steep hills into the valley, lightning spilled like mercury across fields of maguey, silvering the plants' sharp tips like the peaked helmets of conquistadors.”
― Isabel Cañas, The Hacienda