Sydney

“We humans have an impulse to mark our existence in some way that feels permanent. We scribble ‘I was here’ onto our desks at school. We spray paint it on walls. We carve it into bark. I was here. I wanted this sculpture to do to the same, to let it be know that these people lived. A testament to the fact that these humans — with their long strings and medium strings and short strings — they were here.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“At the crest of the hill two stallions backs black against a nectar wash graze on the green-tang clover, acorns to sniff out. We lie together beneath the flowering hawthorn, your white collar unbuttoned. Once, I heard the sound of wind under water, breathed in the sea and survived.”
― Miranda Cowley Heller, The Paper Palace

“The thing about grace is that you don’t deserve it. You can’t earn it. You can only accept it. Or not.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility