Emily

“quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“ The man rolls over onto his back, face-to-face with the morning sky. The messages swarm him. Even here, homeless, he thinks: Nothing will be the same.
The spruces answer: Nothing has ever been the same.
We're all doomed, the man thinks.
We have always all been doomed.
But things are different this time.
Yes. You're here.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays