Mat

“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“If there’s life on other planets, then the earth is the Universe’s insane asylum.”
― Voltaire

“That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“Never blame the man: his hard-pressed
Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe
In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed
In a million years: but the race of man was made
By shock and agony…
… a wound was made in the brain
When life became too hard, and has never healed.
It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood-
sacrifice,
It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter
men,
And hate the world.”
― Robinson Jeffers