Sam Peterson

“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Man is of a far different structure in his guts from ravenous creatures as dogs, wolves, etc., who, minding only their belly, have their guts descending almost straight down from their ventricle or stomach to the fundament: whereas in this noble microcosm man, there are in these intestinal parts many anfractuous circumvolutions, windings and turnings, whereby, longer retention of his food being procured, he might so much the better attend upon sublime speculations, and profitable employments in Church and Commonwealth.”
― Sir Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar