MARCELO PARADELLA

“Because they are almost always above human sightlines, and because people in the city rarely look up, they don't see...them," he said, gesturing to the horror across the street, the horror so strikingly at odds with the anonymous building from which it sprang, like a tumor sprouting from the mild brow of some harmless middle-aged and middle-class executive. "But they...well, you'll notice that they're almost always looking down." He paused, then smiled again. The smile was different this time: thoughtful, and, I think, the tiniest bit uncomfortable.

"We don't see them," he said, "but they see us.”
― Stephen King, Nightmares in the Sky: Gargoyles and Grotesques

“If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.”
― Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

“Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.

Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“What a tricky and uncomfortable thing is conscience, that nearly always begins to trouble us at the moment of, or after, the event, not before, when it might be of some use.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Child of Storm