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Our house burned down. The garden burned down. There were baked apples hanging on the apple tree. We gathered them and ate them.
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-- Varema Presnikova Kaminska, 6 years old. Now, a worker. (Spelling of name unclear; this is an audiobook.)

I approached..the cave mouth to see the subtle undulations of the emerging Batnado on full display..As the small cyclone whipped closer, its intensity grew. With every rotation, thousands more bats leapt from their niches on the cave wall to join in, like a giant spool of black cotton candy..I soon had tens of thousands of..bats barreling around just inches above me, generating an astonishing amount of wind.

She lay for two days & couldn't walk, and on the third they took her away on a stretcher. There was only one way out of the camp: thru the chimney. Straight to heaven. . At night, she & I talked. "Does an angel come to you?" I wanted to tell her about my angel. "No. Mama comes to me. She always wears a white blouse. I remember this blouse she had, with cornflowers embroidered on it."
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There was only one way out of the camp: through the chimney. Straight to heaven.

I've told you that I want to become a restless tongue, feeling the world like a dark, wet mouth, finding its chips, blisters, and cracks. When I saw the steppe I wanted to capture it. But a tongue isn't enough for the steppe. Nothing is enough for the steppe..The steppe requires a song with words as precise as an instrument for seeing the most distant stars. But I had no words, & it was as though I didn't even exist.

Watching my father,I thought I understood him.I could feel that inside me there was.adarkness that begged only to be destroyed..I knew the feeling that drove my father-he was moved by the desire to leave himself behind..There was a darkness in him, but this.didn't make him a romantic hero or someone to be pitied& saved.The darkness deformed him& turned the world around us.into a cramped space where all of us suffered

He looked at me with his ancient eyes, blinking slowly. Uncle Vitya reminded me of a giant koala. ... He told me that I was a rare type of woman. I haven't seen many others like you, he said. You're a wandering woman, there's no peace anywhere for a woman like you....You're not interested in men, and you don't need them either. It's going to be hard for you, he concluded.
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I don't understand what strangers are, because my brother and I grew up among strangers. Strangers saved us! And what kind of strangers are they? All people are one's own. I live with that feeling, though I'm often disappointed. Peacetime life is different.

Maybe you'll become someone important, he continued.A great Russian writer, like Gorky or Tolstoy.
I was unnerved by this conversation.
To be a writer, my father went on, you need a particular kind of wisdom, writerly wisdom.A writer has to be able to love&pity anyone.
But to begin with,I said to him,writers have to understand themselves.
That may be true, my father said.But the main thing is pity&love for others.

A wild blue saltwort bush had risen on the grave, growing out of my father and settling down on the concrete slab. My father had liked to see the grasses growing in the steppe; by fall they all wilted in the sun. Now my father was the steppe, and he nourished it with himself.

When you make up your mind to do something, it never works out.

It's frightening to live alone in the house...When I come out from [the cellar] tanks are moving down the street..Suddenly I see a red star on the turret. Ours! I run to our house..If our tanks have come, Mama has also come! Some women with rifles are standing by the porch..One of them looks somewhat familiar. She reminds me of somebody. She comes closer to me&embraces me. The other women begin to cry. I shout, Mama!

I'll tell about the war, how war smells. ...the months of May and June in 1941 were cold. Usually lilacs blossom sometime in May, but that year they blossomed in mid-June. The beginning of the war for me is always associated with the smell of lilacs, and of bird-cherry. For me, these trees always smell of war.

Night in the steppe is deafening. It's pitch black, and the chirring in it pierces your body with a thousand needles. It's hard to sleep; the entire steppe seems to be launching itself in your direction. The nighttime steppe is an army of archers aiming their electric black arrows directly at you.
Meanwhile the grasses keep whispering, whispering about some mortal danger...

Light is the left hand of darkness,
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, lying together
like lovers in kemmer.
Like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
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My voice shook as I said the lines, for I remembered as I said them that in the letter my brother wrote me before his death he had quoted the same words.
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"I and thou," he said.
"Yes. It does, after all, go even wider than sex."

Fire and fear: good servants, bad lords.

-- I don't mean to be unjust, Estraven.
-- Yet you are. It is strange. I am the only man in all Gethen that has trusted you entirely. And I am the only man in Gethen that you have refused to trust.

"What on earth is that?" Brianna whispered..looking upward like everyone else. "The descent of the Holy Ghost?" ..
I had no idea, but it was getting louder--much louder. The air was beginning to vibrate, and the noise was like a long, continuous roll of thunder..The sky was dark, and a strange, dim light flickered over everything...a peculiar smell filled my nose.
"Birds, my god, it's birds!"

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I stood benumbed. The man was like an electric shock. Nothing to hold onto, and you don't know what hit you. He had certainly spoiled the mood of peaceful self-congratulation in which I had eaten breakfast.

He was, he said, "cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization." It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer..hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies..One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural. ...Of course there is no veneer; the process is one of growth....

The only thing that makes life possible, Genly, is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: Not knowing what happens next.

When I was a teen/young adult I read everything I could find by UKLeG - except this - maybe her most famous? - which i owned but just could not get into. I'm finally trying again - and ... although maybe I understand the subtleties better, alas the first quarter of the book is, well, not very interesting. Blasphemy! I'm sorry, Ursula! But I shall persevere ...

You are alive. You are whole. All is well.

Wikelski [of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany] leads a groundbreaking project called ICARUS, which stands for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space. ICARUS employs tiny tracking tags and powerful receivers installed on satellites..to monitor and map animal movements, from antelope to falcons [aiming] to provide the ultimate birds eye view of..the "pulse of the living planet."

. . .
He waited in emptiness, in faith. And then grace came...and he felt once more the gift of pity, calm in its descent like the landing of a dove. ...
How to tell her in words, then, what he'd learned himself by pain & grace? That only by forgiveness could she forget, & forgiveness was not a single act, but a matter of constant practice.

It was a leap of faith--to throw one's heart across a gulf, and trust another to catch it. His own was still in flight across the void, with no certainty of landing. But still in flight.

The lack of bugs on car windshields is becoming the accessible emblem of insect decline, much the way dejected polar bears are now a sort of shorthand for the climate crisis.
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[Huh! And for me, the fact that people come to the nature preserve where I work just to see fireflies on night hikes -- the children have never seen them. . . "They took all the trees, and put them in a tree museum..." ]

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing.
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And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be on their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
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-- Isaiah 35:1-2, 10

Sleeping under the moon&stars in the arms of a naked lover,the two of you cradled by furs&soft leaves,lulled by the gentle murmur of the chestnut trees&the far-off rumble of a waterfall,is terribly romantic.Sleeping under a crude lean-to,squashed into a soggy mass between a large,wet husband&an equally large equally wet nephew..while fending off the advances of an immense&thoroughly saturated dog,is slightly less so.