May

“Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“What are men to rocks and mountains?”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Many of these policies were proposed by wonks who are comfortable only with traits and correlations that can be measured and quantified. They were passed through legislative committees that are as capable of speaking about the deep wellsprings of human action as they are of speaking in ancient Aramaic. They were executed by officials that have only the most superficial grasp of what is immovable and bent about human beings. So of course they failed. And they will continue to fail unless the new knowledge about our true makeup is integrated more fully into the world of public policy, unless the enchanted story is told along with the prosaic one.”
― David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale