Keely

“Had we been in town amongst people, then we might have been merely interested at the news of having a cursed item in our possession. But out in the midst of no place, shielded by only a scanty wall of scraggly mesquite and weesach from view of the road, where troubles might come from, in the dark of night with the sky stretched out and showing how small we was, and the number of stars making it plain how little we might matter to the broad scheme of the world, I admit to feeling alarm.”
― Elizabeth Crook, The Madstone: A Novel

“I was demolishing a lettuce leaf, my oval raspy-toothed mouth opening and closing like a flesh valve as I oozed along on my own self-generated glistening slime highway. The lovely green blur all around me, the lacework I was creating, the scent of chlorophyll, the juiciness—it was pure bliss. Live in the moment, humans are often told, but snails don’t need to be told. We’re in the moment all the time, and the moment is in us.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“I don't worry about writers disappearing," she said, "not really. You can still knit a sweater, or buy a hand-knit sweater, even if most of them are made by machines. But what does it do to people if everything they read is just the upchuck of a very smart computer program?”
― Sean Michaels

“Some of what makes us human is our smallness. The brevity of our lifespans, the shortness of our memories, the narrowness of each person's field of vision. My Marian-ness is in the slender sample of the world that I am able to bring to my work. If we did not have this smallness, these limits, there would be no way to tell Ffarmer from Sappho, or Eliot, or anybody. So what was I to make of Charlotte--not small but all-devouring, ubiquitous, remembering? Anointed, in a way, by her magnitude. And at the same time, I am certain, diminished by it.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?