Sara Virks

“[H]umans live in a world where it's words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Some people are incapable of perceiving in the object of their contemplation the very thing that gives it its intrinsic life and breath, and they spend their entire lives conversing about mankind as if they were robots, and about things as though they have no soul and must be reduced to what can be said about them - all at the whim of their own subjective inspiration.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Are ideals attainable? Do we live to abolish death? No-we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death's sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.”
― Herman Hesse