Sharon

“The wandering bands of storytelling Sapiens were the most important and most destructive force the animal kingdom had ever produced.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“CUBBY ORDERED an express food delivery in the morning.  It cost extra, but he wasn’t worried about money.  His parents had left him well-off.  How well-off he didn’t know, never having inquired into the matter.  Month by month, year by year, a firm of accountants took his money to clubs on Wall Street where investments of easy virtue lounged.  At least that was how Cubby understood it.  It was a kind of escort service for money, though how the escorts reproduced was a mystery to him.  The same accountants handled his insurance, his tax and now his senior security.  His parents had set up the system when he was in college because they wanted him to concentrate on his studies. And Cubby had concentrated.  He graduated summa cum laude at Harvard, achieving a Ph.D. with a dissertation on synchronized flashing in fireflies. (This little-known phenomenon occurs in the mountains of Tennessee.  It is the insect equivalent of a rock concert.  The male fireflies show up around 8:30 p.m., flashing on and off, watching one another to get the tempo right.  The females, hot little groupies that they are, observe from the ground.  By 9 p.m. the males are flashing in unison and the females go wild.)”
― Nancy Farmer, A New Year's Tale

“There was a school here now, in Concourse C. Like educated children everywhere, the children in the airport school memorized abstractions: the airplanes outside once flew through the air. You could use an airplane to travel to the other side of the world, but—the schoolteacher was a man who’d had frequent-flyer status on two airlines—when you were on an airplane you had to turn off your electronic devices before takeoff and landing, devices such as the tiny flat machines that played music and the larger machines that opened up like books and had screens that hadn’t always been dark, the insides brimming with circuitry, and these machines were the portals into a worldwide network. Satellites beamed information down to Earth. Goods traveled in ships and airplanes across the world. There was no place on earth that was too far away to get to. They were told about the Internet, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how it was us. They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended. This is the yellow mass of land in the shape of a mitten; this pin here on the wall is Severn City. That was Chicago. That was Detroit. The children understood dots on maps—here—but even the teenagers were confused by the lines. There had been countries, and borders. It was hard to explain.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
― Toni Morrison