Martha Patwell

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Barlozzo’s word for nonchalance is sprezzatura. A hard word, a hard concept. The translation is “the state of effortlessness.” It means the mastering of something—an art, a life—without really working at it, with the result being nonchalance.”
― Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure

“After all, bees alone had managed to establish communism in their hives, thanks to their orderliness and labour. Ants, on the other hand, had only reached the stage of real, natural socialism; this was because they had nothing to produce, and so had merely mastered order and equality. But people? People had neither order nor equality. Even their police were useless, just loafing around by the fence”
― Andrey Kurkov, Grey Bees