Filip

“In our commercial society, one may set one's price as high as one wishes, but to refuse to sell at any price is treason.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

“I am deserving of no gifts."

"That is so. But you must recall, Severian, that when a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but payment.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

“This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.
What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps,newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.
What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blesses is he who leaves.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Other people's life stories are not a topic for debate. One should hear them out, and reciprocate in the same coin.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead