This is precisely the time when artists go to work.There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art. 

- Toni Morrison, read entire text here

What would it mean to try to “see” the entire southwest border at once? To travel the whole 1,954 miles in, say, six minutes?
Might simply looking at a place that has been so heavily politicized — a place abstracted into a sound bite — give a small amount of texture and meaning to a phrase like “build that wall”?
The southern border is a space that has been almost entirely reduced to metaphor. It is not even a geography. Part of my intention with this film is to insist on that geography.
By focusing on the physical landscape, I hope viewers might gain a sense of the enormity of it all, and perhaps imagine what it would mean to be a political subject of that terrain.

- Josh Begley, director of Best of Luck With the Wall. Full article here.

One of the first things that deserve to be noted about “Rich Hill”—and that may make it controversial in some quarters—is its beauty. Any description of the film that only describes its people and events would largely miss what it feels like to experience it. From its first moments, when several jump-cut shots of a teenage boy getting ready for school give way to lyrical views of Rich Hill as it comes to life in the morning, the combination of editing rhythms, Nathan Halpern’s music and Palermo’s strikingly luminous images conjure a world that seems to pulse with its own inner warmth and radiance.
Yet any charge that this approach inappropriately prettifies a bleak social landscape would be entirely misplaced. The filmmakers are both native Missourians (Dragos’ father was from Rich Hill and she spent summers there), and the film’s stylistic tone first of all reflects their feelings about a native landscape and communities they know first hand. And, rather than simply being a surface value, it helps establish an empathy that invites us to see not only the hardship but the beauty in lives that are buffeted by difficulty from many directions.
[...]
​On the one hand, we can see the pluck and resilience of Harley, Apachee and Andrew to the extent of imagining that these qualities and their individual talents might rescue them from bad later lives. Yet, coming at a time when the dire effects of America’s economic inequality are more and more in the news, we’re given potent reminders of how limited and bleak the chances of such kids usually are.Some viewers might prefer a film that embraces only one side of that paradox, just as others might prefer a movie about poor people to offer only unrelieved grimness, not beauty. But “Rich Hill” asks us to think about complex issues in a way that avoids simplicities and clichés, and that helps make it a documentary to rank alongside such classics about indigence and family as “Grey Gardens” and “Hoop Dreams.”

"Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion."
- Montaigne, 'Of Repentance' 

... and as originally written... so good: 
"La constance mesme n'est autre chose qu'un branle plus languissant."

I say therefore that likenesses or thin shapes
Are sent out from the surfaces of things
Which we must call as it were their films or bark.
Because the image bears the look and shape
​Of the body from which it came, as it floats in the air.
​
- Titus Lucretius Carus, from 'De rerum natura' 

I cannot tell whether I were more pleased or mortified to observe in those solitary walks that the smaller birds did not appear to be at all afraid of me, but would hop about within a yard’s distance, looking for worms and other food, with as much indifference and security as if no creature at all were near them.  I remember a thrush had the confidence to snatch out of my hand with his bill a piece of cake that Glumdalclitch had just given me for my breakfast.
- Lemuel Gulliver, in Jonathan Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels'

The diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.
​- Johannes Kepler

If I call stones blue it is because blue is the precise word, believe me, and be equally assured that the color of stones can be very well distinguished by starlight.
- Gustave Flaubert, translated from French ("Si je mets bleues après pierres, c'est que bleues est le mot juste, croyez-moi, et soyez également persuadé que l'on distingue très bien la couleur des pierres à la clarté des étoiles")

"Shops, to these [shop owners], are what a cabin in the woods might be to somebody else - a refuge and a justification"
​- Alice Munro, from the short story "The Albanian Virgin"

"Natural selection, for Darwin, did not forbid cultural and individual developments on a timescale hundreds of thousands of times faster than evolutionary development - on the contrary, it prepared the ground for them. We are literate not by virtue of a divine intervention, but through a cultural invention and a cultural selection that makes a brilliant and creative new use of a preexisting neural proclivity."

"I had to realize that the inner workings of the mind could dispense with words."
- Jacques Lordat, describing his aphasia (could not read, speak or understand speech but intellect remained strong as ever) (37)

"... the opposite of alexia is lexical or text hallucinations, or phantom letters [...] the shapes of letters have been selected to resemble the conglomerations of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms. "(70)

"... he reads only in the act of writing [...] knowing or having an idea of what one should see, are crucial in many aspects of perception." (134)

Yet these little hallucinations are interesting, in a way: they show me the background activity, the idling of my visual system, generating and transforming patterns, never at rest (184)