“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.”

— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

"Eventually even the buildings start to go, their stones victim to all the small erosions the desert calls love"

—Fargo Tbakhi, "12 Worlds Interrupted by the Drone"

“Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.”

— Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude

“Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.”

— J. G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights

“Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”

— Richard Wright, Native Son

“A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.”

— Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

“And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn’t have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.”

— Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s inside you is a projection of what’s outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you’re stepping into the labyrinth inside.”

— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.”

— William H. Gass, Finding a Form

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.”

— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

I prefer honesty over loyalty any day, because with honesty comes loyalty.

— Colleen Hoover, It Starts with Us

Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.

— Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Nobody deserves anything ... It's simply a matter of who's willing to go and take it for themselves.

— Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

No one is just a victim or a victor. Everyone is somewhere in between. People who go around casting themselves as one or the other are not only kidding themselves, but they're also painfully unoriginal.

— Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Familiarity is so comfortingly lethal. Old places, known people, and suddenly you are willing to risk it all. You are willing to exchange days for hours and money for moments. There's nothing more exquisite than the pale puckered wall to which memories of your childhood hang. There's nothing more melodious than the annoying honk of your first car. There's nothing more stunning than the nod of your old neighbour. Nothing more soothing than humid and heavy air of your college classroom.

And yet you can go back to the place and not find it. For it's not the same place. You can go back to the people you know the names of and not recognise them. For they are not the same people. And, somehow standing right there with all the nostalgia rising from deepest corner of your heart, you notice the ache... of being there and not belonging there. Of not embodying anymore, the spirit, that you once did. When you belonged to that place. Somehow that place still screams of a distant past that once was your 'present'. And you feel a rush to run. To run into the walls and not away. To somehow become part of those walls that have spied on your evil deeds and that hold your seceret sacred. You want to be purged of your learning and become clean again. And you know you can't, so you admire what's basically ordinary. For the place wasn't never as amazing, as you were, when you were there.

- Syre (19/09/23 00:44)