“In order for me to survive in the music industry as it exists, I had to stuff a pillow over my heart and tell it to stop screaming, and be like, ‘Shut up, shut up, take it’. After a few years of doing that every single day, my heart really did start to go numb and go silent. And the problem with that is that I actually need my heart — my feelings — in order to write music. It was this paradox.”

— Mitski

“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”

— Becky Chambers, 'Monk and Robot'

*A man and woman sit on a bench, he is taking close-up photos with a film camera and she is giggling.*

Woman: “Do you really need pictures of my arms? My shoulders? The ends of my hair?”

*The man gets up off the bench and kneels in front of her, beginning to take photos of her fingers.*

Man: “I want to photograph every inch of you.”

“It may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.”

— Charles Bukowski, 'The Laughing Heart'

“This is the first time in history when a whole generation is being told or tempted to have a machine write for them to express themselves. But youare one of one, unprecedented in the history of human evolution.

There's only one of you, and there never will be another one of you. So to give your voice to a machine to say, speak for me - I'm going to be silent, and I'm going to tell a machine to express my self or to tell my narrative - is such a crime against yourself. It's so dystopian beyond anything I could do in a dystopian novel, and I did a lot. I never saw this coming.

But even your roughest drafts, even your most disjointed-seeming thoughts are valid, and your voice is essential - the human chorus is incomplete without your voice. And I'm going to listen to whatever you say, even the rough drafts - I want those. I want to see it all.

Your voice is the only thing that you have naturally. It's the one thing that nobody can replace. And so let's hear your truth, even if it's raw, even if it's unpolished, even if it doesn't come in the five-paragraph essay or whatever - let’s have it straight from you.”

— Dave Eggers, NPR 2026

“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”

— Becky Chambers, 'Monk and Robot'

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”

— Antoine de Saint‑Exupéry, 'Manon Ballerina'