Danielle

“O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.”
― Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.”
― Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“A history of unalloyed certainties is dangerous because it invites a slide into intellectual torpor. History as truth, issued from the left or the right, abhors shades of gray. It seeks to stamp out the democratic insight that people of goodwill can see the same thing and come to different conclusions. it imputes the basest of motives to those who view the world from a different perch. It detests equivocation and extinguishes 'perhaps', 'maybe', 'might', and the most execrable of them all, 'on the other hand'. In a world devoid of doubt, the truth has no hands.”
― Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History

“Something I heard an archaeologist say in Oslo about deep time returns to me: Time isn’t deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift. Here that seems right, I think. We ghost the past, we are its eerie.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey