I have no faith in god. I have never had; but for those of us who are different there is a compulsion to listen that is almost a faith. Nature, I suppose, chooses once and again to separate a few from the rest. She understands them and speaks to them. But why should we who are thus separated expect human nature to understand?

From The Herries Chronicles, by Hugh Walpole

This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prarie chickens and prarie dogs; dig up the gold and rebury it in vaults sompelace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Commanche; kill Crazy Horse, Kill Sitting Bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrants’ dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean; ship out the wheat; ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and springs, deep-drill  for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats. And in return we condense unimaginable amounts of treasure into weapons buried beneath the land which so much treasure came from – weapons for which our best hope might be that we will someday take them apart and throw them away, and for which our next-best hope certainly is that they remain humming away under the prarie, absorbing fear and maintenance, unused forever.

From Great Plains, by Ian Frazier.

Civil Liberties

Will considered what to do.When you  choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t choose are snuffed out like candles, as if they never existed. At the moment all Will’s choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.

From the Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

... every civilized culture in history has discriminated against  its abnormal members. ‘Schizophrenia’ is a civlized Western term, and so are ‘witch’ and ‘misfit’ – terms used to rationalize the cruel and unusual punishments doled out to extraordinary people. Yet the American Indian tribes …  treated their freaks as special beings. Their schizoids were recognized as having a gift, the power of visions, and were revered for it

From Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, By Tom Robbins.

This is a timeless wisdom that survives failed human economies. It survives wars. It servives definition. It is a nameless wisdom esteemed by all people. It is understanding how to live a decent life, how to behave properly toward other people and toward the land.

From Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez.