Willow A.

“The quest for an ever-whiter shade of bread, which goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, is a parable about the folly of human ingenuity -- about how our species can sometimes be too smart for its own good. After figuring out an ingenious system for transforming an all but nutritionally worthless grass into a wholesome food, humanity pushed on intrepidly until it had figured out a way to make that food all but nutritionally worthless yet gain! Here in miniature, I realized, is the whole checkered history of "food processing." Our species' discovery and development of cooking (in the broadest sense of the word) gave us a handful of ingenious technologies for rendering plants and animals more nutritious and unlocking calories unavailable to other creatures. But there eventually came a moment when, propelled by the logic of human desire and technological progress, we began to overprocess certain foods in such a way as to actually render them detrimental to our health and well-being. What had been a highly adaptive set of techniques that contributed substantially to our success as a species turned into a maladaptive one -- contributing to disease and general ill health and now actually threatening to shorten human lives.”
― Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

“I'm not stronger than anybody. I mean, physically, I can do three pull-ups, so I'm stronger than some people, but emotionally, I'm the same as anyone else. This strength isn't superhuman. It's the most human thing of all, a muscle we're all born with but need to exercise rarely at best. And lucky for us, it's a tenacious little thing that bounces back from atrophy as soon as you need to flex it.”
― Nora McInerny Purmort, It's Okay to Laugh

“He will die, I know it, and I go there, though I have no business doing so. Our human imaginations are woefully unprepared for predicting actual pain, but I hack away at it anyway, trying to form a scar before I m even wounded.”
― Nora McInerny Purmort, It's Okay to Laugh

“Marry someone patient. Let's face it, you're not always a walk in the park. And when you throw a fit because you can't find your keys and he says did you check your purse? and you say of course I checked my purse, do you think I'm a moron?? and then you really check your purse, and there are your keys, you want a person who will just shake his head and smile, and call you an idiot under his breath. But lovingly.”
― Nora McInerny Purmort, It's Okay to Laugh