"She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant,
superbly contemptuous of all that is not
itself, and, as they very definition of passion
implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might
intimidiating power. It contains a challenge.
It contains an unspeakable hope."
— James Baldwin

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
— William Butler Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)

"Treasures are not won by care and forethought
but by swift slaying and reckless attack."
— Michael Moorcock

"Research is formalized curiosity. It is pokin
and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that
he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of
the world and they that dwell therein."
— Zora Neale Hurston