Butterfly Effect

'Didn't he have a crossbow?' he said. 'Bit odd, going after interesting rare butterflies with a crossbow.'

Zorgo readjusted the fit of the grid on his patient's bald head. 'Dunno,' he said, 'I suppose it stops them creating all these damn thunderstorms.'

-Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms, 295.

A Dangerous Business

"[Bilbo] used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?'"

-Tolkein, The Fellowship of the Ring, 72.

Cathedrals

...It is not the purpose of cathedrals simply to make people feel small (there is no virtue in feeling small) but rather to help people understand that they are located within the vast and orderly architecture of creation. We are indeed small, but a small part of something glorious, in which we can participate, find out place, find our purpose. Cathedrals are celebrations of all that God has made, and they embody in their stone and glass the history of God's dealings with his world and people made in his image.

 -Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant, 51.