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“We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is that it will always pass us by & leave us there, alone”

“Some of us, in time become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival.”

“This is what Ove had learned, if one didn’t have anything to say one had to find something to ask. If there was one thing that made people forget to dislike one, it was when they were given the opportunity to talk about themselves.”

“Be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater”

“The water was shot through with what looked like white roots; briefly, a great celestial tree stood in the ocean… For two, perhaps three seconds, a gigantic, blinding white shard of glass from a broken cosmic window danced in the sky, insubstantial yet overwhelmingly powerful”

“I can't help but mix my life with that of the universe. Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness—how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view I have of things? This peephole is all I've got!"

“The sea lay quietly, bathed in a shy, light-footed light, a dancing play of black and silver that extended without limits all about me… my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still.”

“…it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it... You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”

“Soon the sun was alone in the sky, and the ocean was a smooth skin reflecting the light with a million mirrors”

“. . . in humans, animals, trees, in a handful of earth, for everything has a trace of the divine in it. . . The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table that which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing.”

“Truly I am in a sacred cosmic womb, a place where everything is born, and it is my sweet luck to behold its living core.”

“We are more powerful than ever before but have very little idea what to do with all that power… We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem… Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

“If we accept a mere 10th of what animal rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.”

“States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbors in a high rise apt building can’t even agree on how much to pay their janitor how can we expect them to resist the state?”

This book isn’t even trying to argue for veganism but never have I been more compelled…
“A need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction. The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs”

What is natural?
Natural and unnatural originate not from biology, but from christian theology… But evolution has no purpose… There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago… Mouths, for example

“Humans have few redeeming qualities, but their fingerprints are miniature works of art”

“Things that slip out of your hand accelerate toward the floor because earths mass warps time…
When you see an apple fall from a tree, you are watching it roll across the contours of time”

“The whole stump is shimmering with that water-light, as if a luminous river ran through it”

There are hundreds to thousands of meters of mycorrhizal hyphae in a teaspoon of healthy soil & there are more bacteria insects and arthropods than the number of humans that have ever lived on earth

“The total length of mycorrhizal hyphae in the top in the top 10cm of soil is around half the width of our galaxy 4.5 quadrillion km of hyphae.”

“Mycorrhizal hyphae die back and regrow so rapidly... that over a million years their cumulative length would exceed the diameter of the known universe, 48 billion light years of hyphae vs 9.1 billion light years in the known universe.”