“Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates , book Between the World and Me

Source: Between the World and Me (2015), p. 150.
Context: Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Ta-Nehisi Coates 36

writer, journalist, and educator 1975

Banana Yoshimoto book The Lake

Source: The Lake

“The institutions which our ancestors established to to sustain and defend democracy in this country are still with us today, more than two hundred years later.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Afterword, p. 172
The House Of Commons At Work (1993)

“Magick may be no more than the willful invocation of awe.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

11 December 2006
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2006

“There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.”

Anton Chekhov book The Teacher of Literature

The Teacher of Literature (1894)

“Is it not possible that the chimpanzees are responding to some feeling like awe? A feeling generated by the mystery of water; water that seems alive, always rushing past yet never going, always the same yet ever different. Was it perhaps similar feelings of awe that gave rise to the first animistic religions, the worship of the elements and the mysteries of nature over which there was no control? Only when our prehistoric ancestors developed language would it have been possible to discuss such internal feelings and create a shared religion.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Source: Reason for Hope: a Spiritual Journey (2000), p. 189

“The wise man always put more energy in his cause than the expected outcomes and I hope that, you will follow the same path advised by our ancestors.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding?”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Crito
Plato, Crito

“It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors' crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we possessed told their version of what happened, and in their accounts they were completely innocent.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Treason (1988)

“Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5
Context: Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.
Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.

“Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.”

John Steinbeck book Tortilla Flat

Source: Tortilla Flat

“Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.”

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