Nio

“Whenever I listened to his friends speak about issues like prison reform, climate change, the opioid epidemic, in the simultaneously intelligent but utterly vacuous way of people who think it's important simply to weigh in, to have an opinion, I would bristle. I would think, What is the point of all of this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“Mutta niin suurta pulloa ei ole, ettei ihmisen jano ole vielä suurempi, jos sen valloilleen päästää, eikä laaria niin syvää, ettei nälän pitkä kieli sen pohjalautoja viimeisestä jyvästä puhtaaksi ylettyisi nuolemaan, jos sen vaan päästää mittaansa venymään, ja ihmisen ahne sydän, se on nälässään ja janossaan sitte semmoinen peto, että jos sen hellittää järjen raudoista, niin paratiisin tarhoissakin ja taivaan pitopöytien partailla se vielä kiljuisi nieltävää himonsa huutavaan kitaan!”
― Volter Kilpi, Pitäjän pienempiä: saaristoväkeä arkisillaan

“...We humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom