Mel

“I think our own standard had its origins in my grandfather's conviction that the money which people consider theirs by right was unlawfully accumulated, or counterfeit, if it exceeded the average income of a working man.”
― Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing

“The skills I gave him were not skills he needed after all. I wish I nudged him in a direction where his mind could have been as supple as it was, where he wouldn’t have had to harness himself to a dull way of thinking. I felt I had taken someone who once knew how to draw a dog and turned him into someone who instead knew only how to draw shapes.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“For the first time I experienced a place where nature is big and we are small. I understood that wilderness was what my human brain and body had been adapted to for millennia and that the only life I’d known, in a crowded city, was a profoundly unnatural habitat for my species.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World