Norm Jenson

“You could think a grackle was somebody you’d lost, or wronged, or owed a favor to, come back to settle accounts.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum

“Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.”
― Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End: A Pulitzer Prize Winner

“You,” she might have said to a particular grackle. “Georgia. Is it?”
― 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