Sunhawk

“These haymeadow days were the Arcadian age for marsh dwellers. Man and beast, plant and soil lived on and with each other in mutual toleration, to the mutual benefit of all. The marsh might have kept on producing hay and prairie chickens, deer and muskrat, crane-music and cranberries forever. The new overlords did not understand this. They did not include soil, plants, or birds in their ideas of mutuality. The dividends of such a balanced economy were too modest. They envisaged farms not only around, but in the marsh. An epidemic of ditch-digging and land-booming set in. The marsh was gridironed with drainage canals, speckled with new fields and farmsteads.”
― Aldo Leopold, Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology

“We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and these findings about the penetralia of sexual life gave the writer a sort of justification for a native acerbity. Afterwards, when love left him in the lurch and he became the wounded man who was such a trial to us all, he took refuge in a laughter and cynicism which were far from his real nature – a secretive one. He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one’s own feelings upon the image of a beloved was in the long run an act of self-mutilation.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Avignon Quintet: Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian, and Quinx

“Our myth has been that our standard of living would become available to all the peoples of the world. Myths wear thin. We have a visceral appreciation of the truth. That truth, which we don’t dare announce to the world, is what gives us the guilt and the shame and the despair. Nobody in the world will ever live as well, materially, as we once did. And now, as our materialism begins to sicken us, it is precisely what the emerging nations want for themselves. And can never have. Brazil might manage it. But no one else.”
― John D. MacDonald, The Scarlet Ruse