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“We can get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now. Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“God is Powerâ€� Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. And yet, God is Pliableâ€� Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change. This is the literal truth. God can’t be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that persons resolve. If they’re used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God. They help us to shape God and to accept and work”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“appalled by nationalism, they disavowed national history, as nationalism’s handmaiden. But when scholars stopped writing national history, other, less scrupulous people stepped in. Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past. They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will. The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of fiends and frauds willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to pour out the contents of old rubbish bags full of festering incitements, resentments, and calls to violence. When serious historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism. Liberalism is still in there. The trick is getting it out. There’s only one way to do that. It requires grabbing and holding onto a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment, guaranteed by a nation of laws. This requires making the case for the nation.”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation

“All men are born with an ax in their hands, Darling. To take the measure of a man, you just have to pay attention to how he wields it.”
― Nikki St. Crowe, The Never King