"What is lost when birds are lost? Above all, the creatures themselves, in their own splendour and right. And for humans — language, story, beauty, possibility, imagination, lifts of the spirit, ways of being otherwise. Birds are our place-makers, memory-keepers, calendars and clocks. They stitch the world’s parts together: earth to sky, river to woodland, mountain to sea, country to country, hemisphere to hemisphere."  --Robert Macfarlane, The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss

“It's a beautiful world, you know. And kindness is very important, I think, it seems to be forgotten quite a lot.”  --Roger Taylor  (from Queen)

"Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air."

"For what are the comprehensible terrors of a man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!"

"Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing."

"Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that."

Four from "The 74 most incredible lines in "Moby Dick" culled by Delia Cai

https://www.deezlinks.com/p/the-74-most-incredible-lines-in-moby

“Immigrant people can be stripped of almost everything, but never of their dignity, and they hold dreams that no one has the right to despise”.

“Human dignity has no passport nor loses value when crossing a border”.

--Pope Leo XIV

(Canary Islands, 11 June 2026). 

“Experience cannot be communicated without bonds of silence, concealment, distance.”  --Georges Bataille

“Diabolical forces are formidable. These forces are eternal, and they exist today. The fairy tale is true. The devil exists. God exists. And for us, as people, our very destiny hinges upon which one we elect to follow.”  --Ed Warren

"We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary hero losing gradually contact with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator’s desk and roaming space after roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb. He has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought–and he has gained in vitality and stature. We do not laugh at him any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become the paragon."  ---Nabokov