"Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolately caffe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World.
From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. "
— Sarah Vowell

"If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever."
— John McPhee (Basin and Range)

"This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question."
- Andrew Wiggin"
— Orson Scott Card (Speaker for the Dead)

"Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend."
— Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)