Blake Ellis

“Normal people think of recovery as a kind of abstinence: they imagine us sitting around white-knuckled, sweating as we count our hours trying desperately to distract ourselves enough to not relapse. This is because for normal people, drinking is an activity, like brushing their teeth or watching TV. They can reasonably imagine excising drinking, like any other activity, without collapsing their entire person. For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink. There was nothing in my life that wasn’t predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash. Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not punch every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Dr. Sylvia Earle, especially as recounted in Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans. Helen Czerski’s The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works got me thinking larger. And the symphonic cuttlefish comes from Peter Godfrey-Smith’s extraordinary Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“it seems to him that what they call civilization is, in truth, a storm in waiting. Powerful, protean and perfectly destructive, sooner or later it will burst free of its barriers and engulf everything in its insatiable path.”
― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

“Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!