Eric Stephens

“When humans took up farming, they became more disruptive still. According to the paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, the adoption of wet rice cultivation in Asia some five thousand years ago may have released so much methane into the atmosphere from rotting vegetation as to have changed the climate. “A good case can be made,” he suggests, that “the people in the Iron Age and even the late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape than the average modern-day person.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If you Google “How do I write a book?” you’ll get a million hits, but here’s the dirty secret: It’s just math. It’s not even hard math—it’s first-grade addition. Write three pages a day, every day. In a hundred days, you’ll have three hundred pages. Type “The End.” Done.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,’ he said. ‘It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men—it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone—the noblest man alive or the most wicked—has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion