You may turn nature out of doors with violence, but she will still return. [Original: Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurrit.]

Horaz, Episteln I,10,24 (ca. 20 v. Chr.)

Today's clouds can never deny yesterday's beautiful sunset. The inconvenience of today's storms can never turn us from tomorrow's harvest. We plant, we reap, we try because we are human. We hope, we continue. Our soul is rested, but it will have to get up in the morning and start again.

Nikki Giovanni, Racism 101 (1994)

Life is not a problem similar to science or mathematics where solutions can be discerned and tested. Life is a process where people mix and match, fall apart and come back together.

Nikki Giovanni, Racism 101 (1994)

That was the sole lesson of their world: How to make waste, how top make machines that made more waste, how to make wasteful products, how to talk waste, how to study waste, how to design waste, how to cure people who were sickened by waste so they could be well enough to endure it, how to mobilize waste, legalize waste and how to sepise the culture that lived in cloth houses and shit on the ground far away from where they ate. And it would drown them one day, they would all sink into their own waste and the waste they had made of the world and then, finally they would know true peace and the happiness they had been looking for all along.

Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981)