nia

“Of course if we all stay alone and practise celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life wortwhile. I guess you could say the old ways of being together were wrong--they were!--and that we didn't want to repeat old mistakes--we didn't. But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it?...What do we have now? Instead? Nothing. And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“And I think if I believed in God, I wouldn't want to prostrate myself before him and ask for forgiveness. I would just want to thank him every day, for everything.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“The image of Neanderthals picking wildflowers to line the grave of a loved one really brings home how similar they were to us. Solecki claimed that his discovery revealed “that the universality of mankind and the love of beauty go beyond the boundary of our own species.”
― Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues