"When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
— Wendell Berry

"If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?"
— Karl Marx

"She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her."
— Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke: A Novel)

"Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear? "
— Pema Chodron

"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

Do not let the bastards grind you down."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale (Everyman's Library (Cloth)))