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We live in a world of such marvels. We should wake up in the morning and as we put on our trousers we should remember the seahorse and we should scream with awe and we should not stop screaming until we fall asleep, and the same the next day, and the next. Each single seahorse contains enough wonder to knock the whole of humanity off its feet, if we would but pay attention.

— Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell

The trees made the past seem withinlreach in a way that nothing else could: here were living things that had been planted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees that had been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we were gone. They changed the shape of time.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit

...you might prepare for your central mission in life by doing other things that may seem entirely unrelated,and how necessary this may be.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit

We human beings love comfort, and such a radically different world may not be as comfortable as what we, in the West currently experience. It might however, be a world with many more forms for thinking available to us -of joy, of freedom, of pleasure, of community, of self-worth and of love. Love for things that are nothing like us, and which may not love us back.

— Strangers by Rebecca Tamás

Soil is not only where we come from but also the place where our existence ends, this dark forever where we go after death, earth earth and ashes to ashes, our brief life poised between two long eternities of soil. I have watched eternity happening rolling and unrolling time, turning it forwards. I have heard the little rattle of dead leaves, light as rain as earthworms eat and cast leaf litter to create soil acting in sweet complicity with both life and death.

— Why Rebel by Jay Griffiths

Why would you do this? Trying to live where you can never thrive? Trying to go where the universe doesn't want you when there's a perfectly good earth that does. He's never sure if man's lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude.

— Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Sarah Naudi (Narrator)

We are no more than a puff of a wind out on the lake.

— That they may face the rising sun by John McGahern