235 Quotes

“Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.”
― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 1: 180-395

“Janine realized that barriers to treatment were more formidable than she'd understood, as was the epidemic's scope. It wasn't just the money and limited treatment capacity that waylaid people; it was the morphine-hijacked brain, the scrambled neurotransmitters that kept people from thinking clearly or regulating their pain with nonnarcotic substances, or imagining the possibility of feeling happy again.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“If Baru died today, she would die having done nothing for Aurdwynn, or even for Taranoke.

How long could she delay? How much power would she insist on gathering before she did even *one* good thing for the people she'd stepped on? You couldn't manipulate people like little pawns forever. You had to remember that they were their own autonomy, their own power, self-moving, and you had to trust in that --

What was the sense of accumulating all this power if it never went to the people who needed it most?”
― Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant