we thought the future would be chrome and speed, but it turns out the next era is clay. linen. ink. instruments. soil. it's the curve of real handwriting. the creak of a leather book. the sound of someone working. humanity is circling back to itself. and it feels like medicine. - Victoria Erickson

It's a beautiful, good life.

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”

I have many things to show you, which have not come to me so easily. They've arrived in pain, being a fool many times over. These are life's weight you cannot bear just now and so I practice patience. The thought of the days I can reveal them to you linger on my mind constantly. I have lived things in this world which I shouldn't have been so negative and mistaken about, wasted energies. It is through darkness I have been able to see light and even then just barely. What little wisdom I have acquired, it is your reward if you wish to have it.

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” - Issac Asimov

"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

"UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." -Lorax, Dr. Seuss

“Some people fall in love with people’s flowers and not their root’s so when it becomes autumn, they don’t know what to do.”

"Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love." - East of Eden

“You see, there’s a responsibility in being a person. It’s more than just taking up space where air would be." - East of Eden

there is plenty in your life that will not be your fault, but will end up being your responsibility.

Driven out of his home country of Austria, on the run from the Hitler's SS and Gestapo’s, he arrives in Geneva. As a vivid testimony to his character, upon arrival instead of sulking, disparaging and being pessimistic about the state of the world the first thing he does is sit down, and start writing the book that became Human Action, the most comprehensive, systematic, forthright, and powerful defense of the economics of liberty ever written.

[Lee] lifted the breadbox and took out a tiny volume bound in leather, and the gold tooling was almost completely worn away—The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in English translation. Lee wiped his steel-rimmed spectacles on a dish towel. He opened the book and leafed through. And he smiled to himself, consciously searching for reassurance. He read slowly, moving his lips over the words. “Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered. “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.” Lee glanced down the page. “Thou wilt die soon and thou are not yet simple nor free from perturbations, nor without suspicion of being hurt by external things, nor kindly disposed towards all; nor dost thou yet place wisdom only in acting justly.” Lee looked up from the page, and he answered the book as he would answer one of his ancient relatives. “That is true,” he said. “It’s very hard. I’m sorry. But don’t forget that you also say, ‘Always run the short way and the short way is the natural’—don’t forget that.” He let the pages slip past his fingers to the fly leaf where was written with a broad carpenter’s pencil, “Sam’l Hamilton.” Suddenly Lee felt good. He wondered whether Sam’l Hamilton had ever missed his book or known who stole it. It had seemed to Lee the only clean pure way was to steal it. And he still felt good about it. His fingers caressed the smooth leather of the binding as he took it back and slipped it under the breadbox. He said to himself, “But of course he knew who took it. Who else would have stolen Marcus Aurelius?” He went into the sitting room and pulled a chair near to the sleeping Adam.

"It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life."

‘No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.’

“ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOMEDAY. LORD, WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS. Death took a step backwards. It was impossible to read expression in Azrael's features. Death glanced sideways at the servants. LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?”

All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. "So we can believe the big ones?" YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. "They're not the same at all!" YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—" MY POINT EXACTLY.

"If you ignore the rules, half the time people will quietly rewrite them so they don't apply to you."