"Taking yourself too seriously doesn’t just add stress to your life. It closes you off to growth."  --Arnold 

"Most of us have encountered situations where we thought of the perfect reply to an argument after the fact, when it was too late. Denis Diderot describes this phenomenon in his essay “Paradox of the Actor,” recounting how he was initially flustered by a statesman’s comment, only to have the perfect rejoinder occur to him when he was heading down the stairs on his way home. This notion of “l’esprit de l’escalier,” or “staircase wit,” has equivalents in other cultures and languages, including a phrase in Chinese that roughly translates as “shooting after the horse has passed.”'  --Michael Gracey "Staircase Conscience", 2 September 2026, https://thehumanist.com/commentary/staircase-conscience

"People turn things into conspiracies because they have some deep-seated notion that the world is more mystical than it really is."  --A.R. Wise, "314 (Widowsfield Trilogy Book 1)"

“The pathos of man is that he hungers for personal fulfillment and for a sense of community with others.”  J. Saunders Redding 

“Christopher Nolan took a story of war and magic and monsters and homecoming, and he turned it into a story where civilization collapses when people fail to welcome the stranger. He took a story where people honor strangers lest they entertain the gods in disguise, and gently suggests that perhaps every person is worthy of welcome and guest-friendship. He took a story where the gods manipulate everything people do, and gently suggests that people should take some fucking responsibility for their own actions, and along the way shows us what happens when someone betrays the god he claims to worship”  --Leah Schnelbach, “The Eyes of Athena and the Disenchanted World of The Odyssey,” REACTOR, July 22, 2026, https://reactormag.com/the-odyssey-movie-review

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called ‘leaves’) imprinted with dark-pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time - proof that humans can work magic.”  --Carl Sagan 

"The aliens are already here. They are algorithms and they landed more than twenty years ago."  --Mark Stahlman