Jason Oliver

“Scars bear testimony to occupation, to event, but not to circumstances; to phenomena but not conditions. They are evidence only, not details. In which direction was he walking? Were the soles of his boots intact? Was the knife fresh-sharpened? What did he witness? I want to know more than the fact that my grandfather was in the Altamaha floodplain in 1928... Scars turn into trinkets you keep.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“The kind of hope that I often think about...I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation...[Hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Vaclav Havel”
― fritjof capra, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

“Herbivores eat Brussel sprouts,
carnivores eat birds,
cashivores eat dollar bills,
and verbivores eat words.”
― Allen Levi

“How is it, Theo wondered, that a piece of paper - a letter, a photo, a ticket stub, a sketch, a painting - is suddenly transformed by placing it in four bits of wood beneath a pane of glass? What does it mean that we place permanent boundaries around transient moments? What does it say of humankind that we take such trouble to freeze specific memories, that we devote such energy to capturing and preserving the "minute particulars" of our lives?”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden