Donovan

“It was a funny thing to be a disappointment because you were honest and assumed others might be too. The games people played made his head hurt.”
― Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo

“A state of shock is what happens to us- individually or as a society- when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not yet have adequate explanation. At its essence, a shock is the gap that opens up between event and existing narratives to explain that event, Being creatures of narrative, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning vacuums- which is why those opportunistic players, the people I have termed "disaster capitalists," have been able to rush into the gap with their preexisting wish lists and simplistic stories of good and evil.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

“When it comes to the rich, things are very rarely called by their true names”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the ‘successful’ writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip — all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dining room table, with a child's beautifully clear eyes.”
― John Updike, Self-Consciousness