Amanda Longhurst

“Social fissures spread out in all sorts of unanticipated ways. Making snap judgements online about the lives and personalities of people you’d never met had already been a fashionable form of stupidity for quite some time, but now it became an international sport. Fear leaked while people weren’t looking, crept through tiny gaps under doors and puddled. ‘It’s scary out there,’ people said. ‘Stay safe.’ But much of the time it felt like the problem wasn’t out there at all, it was in there, in the screens that everybody carried with them everywhere they went and nobody could stop looking at.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“Early hopes when the pandemic first hit that nature was ‘healing’ had turned on their head and it appeared that in fact the virus was on the side of greed and destruction after all, annihilating all that was small and true and firming up the grip megalomaniacs and madmen had on the planet, in an attempt to push us more quickly towards the abyss.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“Secrets were a luxury only the rich could afford,”
― Elif Shafak, Honor

“What if one day you meet someone, Arthur, and it feels like it could never be anyone else? Not because other people are less attractive, or drink too much, or have issues in bed, or have to alphabetize every fucking book or organize the dishwasher in some way you just can’t live with. It’s because they aren’t this person.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less