Kirk

“He asked that roses be planted on his grave. When I checked, a few years ago, a scrappy red rose was blooming there.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

“Most big freshwater fish, in most parts of the world, have all but disappeared from most places where they used to live. As with arapaima, the main reason is over-harvesting, but there are other factors too. Dams block the migration routes of many fish, so they disappear from the water above the dam — or even altogether, if breeding grounds are cut off. Draining of floodplains, cutting off backwaters, competition from invasive species and pollution also play a part. And sometimes it's just willful slaughter, as was the case with the North American alligator gar in the early 1900s, thanks to the incorrect assumption that killing these predators would boost populations of ‘game’ fish.”
― Jeremy Wade, How to Think Like a Fish: And Other Lessons from a Lifetime in Angling

“Als een sleep wordt de nachtschaduw over de aarde getrokken, en omdat na zonsondergang bijna iedereen tussen de wereldgordels zich te slapen legt, zo vervolgt hij, zou je wanneer je steeds de ondergaande zon volgt, voortdurend kunnen zien hoe de bol die wij bewonen vol ligt met een uitgestrekte, als door de zeis van Saturnus neer-gemaaide en geoogste lichamen - een eindeloos lang kerkhof voor een epileptische mensheid.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses