Mel

“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

“There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“It’s that lack of faith in the public that always results in an erosion of the level of public discourse. A faithlessness in the public is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remove complexity, and the capacity for complexity degrades farther. I think people can be trusted to handle a complicated truth.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth