Andy Weston

“I'm going to need some cactus-of-tongues. The shaman screwed up his eyes, making a hissing sound that expressed both shock and disapproval.
It's very strong, he said, something to try once in a lifetime, maybe twice, and this would be the fourth or fifth time I've given you one; you might get lost on the trip. The huey tlatoani closed his eyes.
The empire weighs on one's shoulders, he said, sometimes too heavy; help is needed. What do you want it for? My meeting is with the chief of the Caxtilteca. Who? Make it ready, that's an order: two pieces, no more. The shaman shrugged. You're the boss, he said, but don't say later that I didn't warn you.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires

“Slabber Olli told her about the places he had been. He had been to the bottom of the sea and wandered endless gardens of stars in outer space. He said that human time as we know it was over.
That the waters would rise and then fall, and then fiery waters would come. The Earth would be reshaped into something new. Mud would flow. Boiling canyons would open up.
"The mountains are already starting to move,” Slabber Olli said.
He told her about creatures that used to live in the sea, like reptiles with two mouths, a horizontal one and a vertical one. He told her about creatures at the bottom of the sea shaped like elm leaves, with five eyes and long, bendy elephant trunks and scissors on their heads.
About sharks with anvils growing on their backs. Flightless birds three meters tall that ran after deer on graceful, muscular legs that bent and stretched, bent and stretched, their beaks opened wide. He told her about the rockets people would build to shoot themselves off to other planets, and how badly it would turn out. Humans would continue their journey. They would find doors to knock on and portals that wouldn't open when they knocked, and the humans would break them down, and the ones they couldn't break they would build keys for. And all the while, humans would be changing. Humans would be changed not just by time but by humans themselves, and before long you'd have to call them human derivatives, and then something else entirely. In the end, it was just matter rearranging itself over and over. What was the Earth? Nothing more than an entrance hall where humanity had once briefly waited.
Slabber Olli talked about a lot of other things, too, and Elina listened and understood that the part of Slabber Olli that was still human wanted to wander and search for knowledge, just like anyone else. The evening advanced, the light softened. At some point, Slabber Olli disappeared. Elina went back to the boat.”
― Juhani Karila

“On the map the southern part of the Peloponnese looks like a misshapen tooth fresh torn from its gum with three peninsulas jutting southwards in jagged and carious roots. The central prong is formed by the Tayegtus mountains, which from their northern foothills in the heart of the Morea to their storm-beaten southern point, Cape Matapan, are roughly a hundred miles long. About half their length - seventy five miles on their western and forty five on their eastern flank and measuring fifty miles across - projects tapering into the sea. This is the Mani.
As the Taygetus range towers to eight thousand feet at the centre , subsiding to north and south in chasm after chasm, these distances as the crow flies can with equanimity be trebled and quadrupled and sometimes, when reckoning overland, multiplied tenfold.
Just as the inland Taygetus divides the Messenian from the Laconian plain, its continuation, the sea-washed Mani, divides the Aegean from the Ionian, and its wild cape, the ancient Taenarus and the entrance to Hades, is the southernmost point of Greece.
Nothing but the bleak Mediterranean, sinking below to enormous depths, lies between this spike of rock and the African sands and from this point the huge wall of the Taygetus, whose highest peaks bar the bare and waterless inferno of rock.

The Taygetus rolls in peak after peak to its southernmost tip, a huge pale grey bulk with nothing to interrupt its monotony.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

“From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shape of things.
When I was fifty I had published a universe of drawings.
But all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with.
At seventy three I have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects.
When I am eighty you will see real progress.
At ninety I will have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself.
At one hundred, I will be a marvellous artist.
At one hundred and ten, everything I create - a dot, a line - will come alive.
I call on those who still may be alive to see if I keep my word.”
― Hokusai, The Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji