Tonti Riyad

“in the abstract she knew this truth, that to the cosmos they were fundamentally irrelevant, that they came from dust and returned to dust and ash. And she should have taken comfort in that, but in that moment she didn’t want to be temporary and immaterial;”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“He was so beautiful then, standing right in the space of the road where a beam of moonlight fell across his face, illuminating one side and casting long shadows on the other.

He looked like glazed porcelain, preserved glass. He was a sculptor's approximation of a person, not human himself. He can't be real, she thought. A boy made of flesh and bone could not be so painfully lovely, so free of any blemish or flaw.”
― RF Kuang

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby