Will Bell

“The deer in procession resemble charcoal cave paintings rendered manifest. Art's magic working backwards. The chalk behind them, bone. And not the hare runs, too. The hare runs in the opposite direction to the deer. The animals runs, and the landscape seems then to be parting in front of me. Deer one way, hare the other. And now they are quite gone: the hare to the fieldmargin at the top of the hill to my left, the deer into the wood at the top of the hill to my right. There is nothing before me now but wind and chalk and wheat.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“It was but an illusion, but that dear little face, still so soft and silent, told them so many things which none other would have heard!”
― Émile Zola, Fruitfulness

“The same cause which may increase the [net] revenue of the country’ (i.e., as Ricardo explains in the same passage, ‘the revenues of landlords and capitalists’, whose wealth, from the economic point of view, is equivalent to the wealth of the nation), ‘may at the same time render the population redundant and deteriorate the condition of the labourer’ (Ricardo, op. cit., p. 469). ‘The constant aim and the tendency of every improvement in machinery is, in fact, to do away entirely with the labour of man, or to lessen its price by substituting the labour of women and children for that of grown-up men, or of unskilled for that of skilled workmen’ (Ure, op. cit., p. 23).”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1

“The flagellar motor of bacteria is a prodigy of human nature. It drives the only known example outside of human technology of a freely rotating axle.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion