Ade

“Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away. We wondered what thise visitors would find here. We liked to guess at what would last. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people's homes.
But among the artifacts that will never be found - among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives - is a certain patch of sidewalk on a Californian street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew - our names, the date, and these words: We were here.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“There are no tigers for us, just a city, waiting, and it loves us, in whatever ways a city can love.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“The deaths—tiny ones, false ones, real ones—we undertake in the name of love are the closest that we ever come to greatness.”
― Amanda Lee Koe, Ministry of Moral Panic