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“Yet the moonlight sonatas of the world don't simply discharge our emotions; they elevate them. Also, it's only sad music that elicits exalted states of communion and awe. Music conveying other negative emotions, such as fear and anger, produces no such effect. Even happy music produces fewer psychological rewards than sad music, concluded Sachs, Damasio, and Habibi. Upbeat tunes make us want to dance around our kitchens and invite friends for dinner. But it's sad music that makes us want to touch the sky.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“... there is a difference between reading about the end of the world and actually seeing it with your own eyes. Watching a kingdom, drunk on sugar and youth culture and hippie nostalgia and reality TV and porno dreams and Hollywood lies, shrivel up and fall apart; it's like watching Alexandria and Constantinople and Rome and Athens all crumble to ash. Rising poverty. The annual migration inland, as the unemployment and homelessness and hopelessness on the West Coast spread like poison through a society that hadn't yet recovered from the pandemic. And on top of that, the forest fires that began earlier and ended later each year, meaning that a period that had once stretched from June to September now spanned April to November. Some parts of California were now more or less uninhabitable, there were places the insurance companies refused to cover, with homeowners unable to renew their existing policies, and I knew enough to understand that once the money starts leaving a place, the people follow.”
― Jens Liljestrand, Even If Everything Ends

“A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has oder, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”
― Liet-Kynes

“The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly