Jake Saul

“Dreaming may simply be a by-product of this nightly cerebral housecleaning. As the brain clears wastes and consolidates memories, neural circuits fire randomly, briefly throwing up fragmentary images, a bit like someone jumping between television channels when looking for something to watch. Confronted with this incoherent flow of memories, anxieties, fantasies, suppressed emotions, and the like, the brain possibly tries to make a sensible narrative out of it all, or possibly, because it is itself resting, doesn’t try at all, and just lets the incoherent pulses flow past. That may explain why we generally don’t remember dreams much despite their intensity—because they are not actually meaningful or important.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“Call me by your name and I'll call you by mine.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“The skin consists of an inner layer called the dermis and an outer epidermis. The outermost surface of the epidermis, called the stratum corneum, is made up entirely of dead cells. It is an arresting thought that all that makes you lovely is deceased. Where body meets air, we are all cadavers. These outer skin cells are replaced every month. We shed skin copiously, almost carelessly: some twenty-five thousand flakes a minute, over a million pieces every hour. Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self. Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants