#nature

What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be. ↗

— David Mitchell

#violence #war #nature

nights and days came and passed and summer and winter and the sun and the wind and the rain. and it was good to be a little island a part of the world and a world of its own all surrounded by the bright blue sea. ↗

— Margaret Wise Brown

#nature #nature

I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#noise #nature

You would think there's a natural limit to tears: only so much the body can give at one sitting before it runs dry. ↗

— Janice Galloway

#tears #weeping #nature

If you call them a sin against nature again, I will end you." Ethan's hand was on his dagger's hilt. "Look who's a born-again Guardian evangelist now." Connor laughed. "What's up with that?" A blush slid up Ethan's neck. "Nothing. They're our allies. That's all." "Sure it is." Conner said. ↗

— Andrea Cremer

#ethan #nature

I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people. ↗

— Sara Quin

#living-on-the-fringe #outsider #sara-quin #solitude #surrounded-by-people

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché. ↗

— Khaled Hosseini

#writing #nature

If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed ↗

— Alan Watts

#nature

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#nature

Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you -- and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us! ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#creation #destruction-of-nature #mankind #nature