V

“Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you?”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship – to teach, if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“The ache to return to a time long gone was almost worse than fear.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!