Annie

“When we commemorate the end of a war, we neglect the way that it began. Every war ends, after all; but not every war had to begin.”
― Timothy Snyder (author)

“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

“I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they build cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“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