Norm Jenson

“Song I try to make the step-down call of the chickadee, but do it too insistently, over and over so it loses sense, the air going equally out and back, not slower in the opening, then quickening as the tight hinge retracts, but absolutely evenly, too even, the way one breathes and regulates breath for a doctor, to present the body’s equanimity. There’s a bird in a tree with a hinge in its throat, a door opening to let the sweet air pass from a high, thin place down a notch. There’s phlox out there, opening between one black and another black, hanging branch of an apple tree—the very tree that holds the bird that bends the air so parenthetically around itself, and its song around anything listening.”
― Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays

“Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Some grackles might possess souls and some grackles might possess intelligence but it was impossible to believe that any one grackle possessed both: not enough room in their brilliantined heads. A klatch of them walked unnervingly around the parking lot outside the vintage store like a family at a hotel wedding, looking for the right ballroom. One grackle was missing a foot, and Thea blamed him for it. If they had been magpies, she might have counted them up, wondering what they foretold, but grackles were just seagulls in widows’ weeds. They weren’t omens of anything except more grackles.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum

“English philosopher Bertrand Russell, another prominent twentieth-century pacifist, once used those medicinal facts about iodine to build a case against the existence of immortal souls. “The energy used in thinking seems to have a chemical origin…,” he wrote. “For instance, a deficiency of iodine will turn a clever man into an idiot. Mental phenomena seem to be bound up with material structure.” In other words, iodine made Russell realize that reason and emotions and memories depend on material conditions in the brain. He saw no way to separate the “soul” from the body, and concluded that the rich mental life of human beings, the source of all their glory and much of their woe, is chemistry through and through.”
― Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements