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To go down into the earth is to travel back in time, and to excavate it is to drag the past into the present, a process mining has done on a scale so colossal it's changed the earth all the way up to the upper atmosphere.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 55)

If the childhood game of “playing house” was instead focused on “playing river,” the main characters would no longer be humans. In the art installation River Construct, the assembled players are plants, worms, bacteria, people, a rabbit, and a solar-powered water pump and timer system. Just as in outdoor rivers, the plants ate sunlight and minerals, animals ate plants, worms and bacteria ate the waste from animals and plants and produced their own waste, which is actually nutritious food for plants, which circulates through the water as nutrients, and so on. Humans are not necessary for the functioning of actual rivers, but in this indoor mini version they were needed as maintenance workers and as admirers.

— Plants by Numbers by Helen V. Pritchard, Jane Prophet (Page 46)

I don't have a telescope; I'm inside one. The practice of research lengthens the line of sight.

— White Mosque by Sofia Samatar (Page 296)

Weeds mark the history of man-made constructions like this, but perhaps above all their frailties: the weak spots, joins and repairs. Small failures and misjudgements are highlighted green within weeks.

— Understorey by Anna Chapman Parker (Page 10)

I think of all the women who lay in the street at Ak Metchet, who climbed on the cars, who carried their children onto the cars. Such women generally leave few records. Their letters, if preserved, are considered to have little meaning outside the family. These women leave behind quilts, embroidery, recipes, planting schedules. Perhaps a knack for languages. The shape of an elbow or a nose. Their legacy consists of objects and children. To seek these women, who treated their bodies so recklessly, is to be stuck with the body.

— White Mosque by Sofia Samatar (Page 194)

If you write for a living, the return (as impact, as income, as appreciation) can be a nebulous thing, but you reap what you sow in a garden—if the weather holds and the pests don't devour everything.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 45)

What the men of the Russian Revolution had learned from the French Revolution — and this learning constituted almost their entire preparation — was history and not action. They had acquired the skill to play whatever part the great drama of history was going to assign them, and if no other role was available but that of the villain, they were more than willing to accept that part rather than remain outside the play.

— On revolution by Hannah Arendt (Penguin twentieth-century classics) (Page 58)