₊ ⊹Batayan

“He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Love was there in my empty bed. It was piled up in the records Lauren bought me when we were teenagers. It was in the smudged recipe cards from my mum in between the pages of cookbooks in my kitchen cabinet. Love was in the bottle of gin tied with a ribbon that India had packed me off with; in the smeary photo-strips with curled corners that would end up stuck to my fridge. It was in the note that lay on the pillow next to me, the one I would fold up and keep in the shoebox of all the other notes she had written before. I woke up safe in my one-woman boat. I was gliding into a new horizon; floating in a sea of love. There it was. Who knew? It had been there all along.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“We are a spectacle to the world. Let the great and humble, by our example, see to what state they shall be inexorably reduced, whatever their condition, age, or sex. Why then, miserable person, are you puffed up with pride? Dust you are, unto dust you return, rotten corpse, morsel and meal to worms.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“Cattle die
kinsmen die
all men are mortal.
Words of praise
will never perish
nor a noble name.

- The Havamal; Book of Viking Wisdom”
― the Havamal