Maria

“She was thinking about how not to think. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait [...] How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“A man should want to be domestic, steady, moral, politic, reasonable. He should want also to be subsumed, whirled, to know himself as dust in the fingers of the wind. This was his supple, unbreakable faith.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of the sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones- inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones- rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays