hiding from this world together, next thing i knew they had brought her things down to the bay

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we're distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within."
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair."
--Elie Wiesel

"She did not want to tell herself seriously a story; it was the sense of adventure and escape that she wanted."
--Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

"People need motivation to do anything. I don't think human beings learn anything without desperation."
--Jim Carrey

"The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched."
--Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"Wherever she goes, things are changed under her eyes; and yet when she has gone is not the thing the same again?"
--Virginia Woolf, The Waves

"How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived?"
--Sylvia Plath

"Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe."
--Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

"But love...it's only an illusion. A story one makes up in one's mind about another person. And one knows all the time it isn't true. Of course one knows; why one's always taking care not to destroy the illusion."
--Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

"You will die. You will not live forever. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose. ...That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, to buy safety for yourself--safety forever?"
--Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore