Nick

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“The sun was coming out, and steam rose up off every jutting muddy piece of the land, which sparkled in a great show of democracy. A discarded truck bumper shone just like the sandstone, just like a scrap of metallic insulation and the white of yarrow flowers and the flash of blue jays’ wings, a coil of chicken wire, an old license plate half entombed in mud.”
― Madeline Ffitch, Stay and Fight

“A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“There is no more pressing or torturous task for man, having found himself free, than to seek out someone to bow down to as soon as he can…someone on whom to bestow that gift of freedom with which this unhappy creature was born…”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets