Kirk

“As early humans moved about, they were accompanied by a whole entourage of creatures they had come to depend on, or learned to coexist with — not only their crop plants and domesticated animals, which they carried with them deliberately, but also the creatures that had adopted them during their lengthy process of developing agriculture and animal husbandry and building habitations and cities, roads and canals, seaports and fortifications. To quote Anderson [Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man, and Life:]

‘Unconsciously as well as deliberately man carries whole floras about the globe with him, he now lives surrounded by transported landscapes, and our commonest everyday plants have been transformed by their long associations with us so that many roadsides and dooryard plants are artifacts. An artifact, by definition, is something produced by man, something which we would not have if man had not come into being. That is what many of our weeds and crops really are.”
― Richard Orlando, Weeds in the Urban Landscape: Where They Come from, Why They're Here, and How to Live with Them

“La vérité est si obscurcie en ces temps et le mensonge si établi, qu'à moins d'aimer la vérité, on ne saurait la reconnaître.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Als een sleep wordt de nachtschaduw over de aarde getrokken, en omdat na zonsondergang bijna iedereen tussen de wereldgordels zich te slapen legt, zo vervolgt hij, zou je wanneer je steeds de ondergaande zon volgt, voortdurend kunnen zien hoe de bol die wij bewonen vol ligt met een uitgestrekte, als door de zeis van Saturnus neer-gemaaide en geoogste lichamen - een eindeloos lang kerkhof voor een epileptische mensheid.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“In Maie get a weede hooke, a crotch and a glove,
And weed out such weedes as the corne doth not love.
Slack never thy weeding, for dearth nor for cheape,
The corne shall reward it er ever ye reape.

[Thomas Tusser, ‘Five hundred points of husbandry: directing what corn, grass, is proper to be sown: what trees to be planted: how land is to be improved: with with whatever is fit to be done for the benefit of the farmer in every month of the year’ (1557).]”
― Helen Nearing, Wise Words for the Good Life