David

“Merlyn held up his hand. “Give him the humble earth-worm,” he said majestically. So the animals recited in unison: “The naturalist Darwin has pointed out that there are about 25,000 earth-worms in every field acre, that they turn over in England alone 320,000,000 tons of soil a year, and that they are to be found in almost every region of the world. In thirty years they will alter the whole earth’s surface to the depth of seven inches. ‘The earth without worms,’ says the immortal Gilbert White, ‘would soon become cold, hard-bound, void of fermentation, and consequently sterile.’​”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn: The Conclusion to the Once and Future King

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

“If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie." When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poison, and come to "Cyanide," I am going to put under "Uses" the phrase "Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“If this road, this series of stepping stones, leads nowhere, then so be it. I walk the road with friends, and so I have my home. —Drizzt Do’Urden”
― R.A. Salvatore, Passage to Dawn