“The manner in which I learned to read and write, not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease, so much so, that I have no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet.”

Good communication is the bridge between confusion and clarity.

Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.

I was not addicted to stealing in my youth, nor have ever been; yet such was the confidence of the Negroes in the neighborhood, even at this early period of my life, in my superior judgment, that they would often carry me with them when they were going on any roguery, to plan for them.

It was unexpected. That’s just how it was. I don’t believe they were faster than us. I don’t believe they had more heart or dedication. It just fell on their side. That’s the reality of it.

To a mind like mine, restless, and observant of everything that was passing, it is easy to suppose that religion was the subject to which it would be directed; although this subject principally occupied my thoughts, there was nothing that I saw or heard of to which my attention was not directed.

We may have made one of the biggest and most stupid collective mistakes in history by getting so worried about global warming.

A collection of errors does not make a truth: quality cannot stem from quantity – a value is not a weight.

You are a dangerous collection of all my favorite things. An old soul, a heart of gold, and hands that make my body sing.

We must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all, not once but continually.

When people throw stones at you, don’t throw them back. Collect them all and build an empire.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.

The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century

Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.