Mia

“God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.”
― Jeff Vandermeer , Authority

“Holy Mica, we were true humanists over there, on Earth. Humanism was the backbone of our personalities; in our worship of Man, in our love of Man, we even approached anthropocentrism - and here we are suddenly horrified to catch ourselves thinking, 'Are these really humans? Is it possible they are capable of becoming humans, even with time?'.”
― Boris Strugatsky, Hard to Be a God

“He had never experienced anything like this before outside the Zone. And it had happened in the
Zone only two or three times. It was as though he were in a different world. A million odors cascaded in
on him at once—sharp, sweet, metallic, gentle, dangerous ones, as crude as cobblestones, as delicate
and complex as watch mechanisms, as huge as a house and as tiny as a dust particle. The air became
hard, it developed edges, surfaces, and corners, like space was filled with huge, stiff balloons, slippery
pyramids, gigantic prickly crystals, and he had to push his way through it all, making his way in a dream
through a junk store stuffed with ancient ugly furniture … It lasted a second. He opened his eyes, and
everything was gone. It hadn't been a different world—it was this world turning a new, unknown side to
him. This side was revealed to him for a second and then disappeared, before he had time to figure it out.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, man can attain perfection. —Plato”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain