Lóre Stevens

“My main purpose in life is to do something useful for my fellow men, not to live my life in vain, to propel mankind forward, if only by a fraction. That is why I became interested in that which gave me neither bread nor power, but I am in hopes that my work, perhaps soon, perhaps only in the distant future, will yield society heaps of grain and vast power.”
― Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

“It occurs to me that the energy in my body is the same as the energy in the red power lights, just a different current. What’s inside the office lights is inside me. It’s also what’s in the stars a million miles away. The water in my blood is the same stuff rushing in the creek next to me. The wind that is outside of me is also inside of me. I pull it in and push it out; it is the same breath being used by the frogs, the birds, the people breaking into cars downtown, pumping through the HVAC systems of the condos down the road. I pick up my hand and stare at it, thick, heavy, cold. I am earth. This is earth. I am the dirt I am walking on. I am conscious earth. They are here all the time. Something, finally, clicks. Bliss floods me, like a drug, like a wave. I take a great, heaving breath. All the atoms in my body remember what it was like to be inside the core of a star right before it went supernova. Before I know it, I am staring at my hand, crying. I am crying because my hand is a miracle. It’s like I have never seen it before. My hand is all five elements made flesh. I am a miracle. Everything is a fucking miracle. It is urgent. It is overwhelming.”
― Diana Helmuth, The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft

“Those two people in the back of the boat, he felt kind of sorry for them. They still lived in the drowned city, they belonged down there, and the fact that they couldn't go there broke their hearts. But not Deaver. His city wasn't even built yet. His city was tomorrow.”
― Orson Scott Card, Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse

“In reflecting on these conflicts in the Balkans, political philosopher Michael Ignatieff observes that closely related (often inter-related) group identities became segregated along rigid collective boundaries that illustrate Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical concept of the "narcissism of minor differences" (Ifnatieff, 1997, 34-71). According to Freud, small differences between people become magnified and classified manipulatively and destructively, especially when those people are actually quite similar or live in close proximity to one another. In fact, according to Freud, the more similar or closely related people or groups are, the more likely they will be to amplify their small differences (Freud, 1985, 131, 305) This tendency is liable to assume the form of pathological self-love (narcissism) in which loving oneself (and one's people) becomes indistinguishable from loathing "the other" (i.e., those who are different from oneself and the members of one's group) Such self-love perceives the very existence of the other as a source of anxiety; it is perceived as harmful to - in some way, a judgment against - oneself and one's group. Typically, this narcissism results in explicit violence against the other who is perceived as perversely different but is, in the vast majority of ways, actually quite similar.”
― Atalia Omer, Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook