Curtis Nash

“There's an invisible Tokyo built of them, existing in the minds of us, its citizens. Internet, manga, Hollywood, doomsday cults, they are all places where you go and where you matter as an individual. Some people will tell you about their places straight off, and won't shut up about it all night. Others keep it hidden like a garden in a mountain forest.
People with no places are those who end up throwing themselves onto the tracks.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“I nodded and drank the tea. It had the sharp taste of bark. With Clemence gone, we could get down to business. I needed to find out about the ghost, first of all. Then I needed luck. I asked Mooshum about the ghost and described it. I told him that the same ghost had come to Randall.

It’s not a ghost, then, Mooshum said.

What is it, then?

Someone’s throwing their spirit at you. Somebody that you’ll see.

Could it be the man?

What man?

I took a breath. Who hurt my mother.

Mooshum nodded and sat motionless, frowning.

No, probably not, he said at last. When somebody throws their spirit at you they don’t even know it, but they mean to help. For weeks mon père dreamed that horse trampled him. Twice, I saw the angel that came to take my Junesse. Be careful.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Round House

“The tree of life shows at a glance the antiquity and the kinship of all living organisms and how there is "descent with modification" (as Darwin originally called evolution) at every juncture. It shows too that evolution never stops, never repeats itself, never goes backwards. It shows the irrevocability of extinction--if a branch is cut off, a particular evolutionary path is lost forever.”
― Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness

“Not the Happiness but the Consequence of Happiness

He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods,
the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will
not hear his voice all day. He remembers what
the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping.
The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking
about women. Not with desire so much as with a sense
of what is not. The January silence is the sound
of his feet in the snow, a squirrel scolding,
or the scraping calls of a single blue jay.
Something of him dances there, apart and gravely mute.
Many days in the woods he wonders what it is
that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand
in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure,
but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married
into aloneness. He walks the paths doing the strange
mathematics of the brain, multiplying the spirit.
He thinks of caressing her feet as she kept dying.
For the last four hours, watching her gradually stop
as the hospital slept. Remembers the stunning
coldness of her head when he kissed her just after.
There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness.
It is, he decides, a quality without definition.
How strange to discover that one lives with the heart
as one lives with a wife. Even after many years,
nobody knows what she is like. The heart has
a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes,
is ambitiously unfaithful. Dies out unaccountably
after eight years, blooms unnecessarily and too late.
Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods,
leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems