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“Throughout the history of men there’s always been some kind of drug, and the people stuck on it. The people who push the stuff are on a different kind of drug, one so powerful that they are not aware of its own, ravaging, animalistic effect on them.”

“What’s that?”

“Power and greed,” he told her. “The ugliest—no, the second ugliest ravager of people ever known.”

“What’s the ugliest then?” she asked him.

“Fear,” he replied seriously. “It destroys, rots, and touches everyone around.”

I am Baobab, the first tree, the everlasting tree, the totem tree. My roots reach deep into the belly of the earth. My crown pierces the sky. I seek the light that brightens the universe, illuminates darkness, and soothes hearts. (III)

Even the people were bred without imaginations. The imaginative ones were fixed—or gotten rid of. Too dangerous to have a thinker unless he thought the government’s way.

I'm a trespasser in the Kingdom of Death. This is his private domain, his empire, where he rules with absolute power. I feel like an astronaut floating in space, a thousand miles from earth. The slightest tear in his spacesuit and he’s lost. The slightest tear in mine, just like him, I’m lost too.

“All magic means is a line between knowledge and ignorance,” Ortega responded. “A magician is someone who can do something you don’t know how to do. All technology, for example, is magic to a primitive.”

To tell the truth, the only thing more exhausting than doing something is doing nothing at all.

We were here to last. We were here to spread our shade over the remotest lands. We were here so our foliage would murmur the secrets of the four corners of the world. But human beings have destroyed our hopes. No matter where in the world they are, they wage war on the forest. Our trunks crash to the ground with a sound like thunder. Our naked roots mourn the end of our dreams. You cannot destroy the forest without spilling blood.

It will take years for us to recover from what we've lived through. And also to forget. I tell myself that life is incomprehensible. We need death to bring us back together. (VI)

As a bat, somewhere midway between a mammal and a bird, with my foxy-looking fangs and snout and my translucent wings, I harbor but one regret: having let Ebola escape from my belly. It was dormant in me until Man came and wreaked the splendour of the forest.

I found that the rich whom I’d envied dreamed of greater riches, and that power came not from obeying the law but from not getting caught.

PTSD is an adaptation, a mechanism our genius bodies evolved to help us survive. (Chapter 43)

Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee. Or a dad who stayed and brought you a bouquet of flowers at your graduation. Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself.