It seemed to me that I was half unlearning what I had never learned and yet knew so well – how to live. Yes, I think it was probably then that everything began.
— The Fall, Albert Camus

In becoming what one is, a person turns back, into, gathers something of the past, and carries it forward. It is genealogy compressed under high pressure. The present, as such, is but a placeholder where the past and future meet, a fleeting moment where becoming takes place.
— Hiking with Nietzsche, John Kaag

It is as if we go through a cycle: The more knowledge we accumulate about a particular natural or man-made phenomenon, the more it changes from something mysterious into something merely “complicated,” then into something simple, until we probe and question the elements of its simplicity, and it enters the realm of mystery once more.
— Erno Rubik, Cubed: The Puzzle of us all

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines – it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.
— Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

“There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

    If you sang the song, the way it was written
    And you march along, to the beat of the drum
    Someday soon, you gonna wake up singin’
    Battle is over, but the war goes on
— Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee

We are going to need fresh troops.
— Phil Zimmermann, as PGP turns 30

 It was just happening as a process of my own grief, and made sense that it should go in an album even though it’s just voice and guitar. It’s something I didn’t even really instrumentalize. It’s an incomplete song. It grew legs and walked into the album itself. I woke up and had the voice note of the melody there.
— Arooj Aftab

 ‘Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded.’
— “Klara and the Sun”, Kazuo Ishiguro

I need to care about and be touched by what I read. I can’t care about a book that has nothing to contribute to the wisdom project.
— Susan Sontag

Different nations speak of the many possible relationships to money when they speak: The French “gain” money (gagner), the English “earn” it, the Americans “make” it, the Russian “works” for it (работать), and in my mother tongue, we “look for” it (keres).
— Ernö Rubik, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All