DB

“I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting.

Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“Of course they won't bloody remember, they'll be dead.' Then she called him a name in a dead language that translated, roughly, to 'poop on a stick,' but sounded more succinct, like this: 'Of course they won't bloody remember, they'll be dead, Poopstick.”
― Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Art

“What is Required by Paul Allen (fragment)
1
All elsewhere being World,
how many times have I stood
in the bright shadows of a wood,
no track or trail leading in, out-
as though ground cover
renewed as I went through?
I sometimes own the moments where I stand
alone. Everything else is air
and arbitrary firings of neurons
we call memory if they happened,
fantasy if they didn’t- same pictures.
Call it prayer, then,
the moments where I’m not aware
even of how lovely the moment is-
not liking, not disliking-
not aware there is a moment
until I’m back in the world
and remember it- construct it
in my mind as having been beautiful.
4
I’m too often bitten by silence.
My mother called it dawdling,
the ex, brooding. My students call it
absent-minded professor.
The kindest students bring me back gently.
But I live most when silence,
shade, and light like this harvest me,
a kind of prayer I’m gathered to,
not the prayer I clutter with will or words.”
― Paul Allen, Ground Forces

“And I'll have you know that if you hurt my son again, if he so much as sighs sadly over his coffee, I will hire a man, a Russian, probably, to hunt you down and rip all that shiny black hair from your head, then break your skinny arms and legs, and set you on fire, and then put you out with a hammer. And should there be children from your beastly rutting, I shall have the Russian man cut them to tiny pieces and feed them to Madame Jacob's dog. because, although he may be only a worthless, simpleminded, libertine artist, Lucien is my favorite, and I will not have him hurt. Do you understand?”
― Christopher Moore, Sacre Blue