Buford Floris

“Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhumane spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, posess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally...”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“The morgue was the name the human workers gave to this room in the facility. They were careful not to utter it in front of the androids, for fear of offending them.”
― A.R. Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“Sitting with Sindikubwabo [former President of Rwanda in exile in Zaire] as he offered what sounded like a rehearsal of the defense-by-obfuscation he was preparing for the tribunal, I had the impression that he almost yearned to be indicted, even apprehended, in order to have a final hour in the spotlight.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups--and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand ... you have to go back to the past ... it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success