Sophie

“In South Africa in the early 1990s, a joke was making the rounds: Given the country’s daunting challenges, people had two options, one practical and the other miraculous. The practical option was for everyone to pray for a band of angels to come down from heaven and fix things. The miraculous option was for people to talk with one another until they could find a way forward.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“L'amour est une catastrophe magnifique: savoir que l'on fonce dans un mur, et accélerer quand même.”
― Frédéric Beigbeder, L'amour dure trois ans

“A human being weighing 70 kilograms contains among other things:
-45 litres of water
-Enough chalk to whiten a chicken pen
-Enough phosphorus for 2,200 matches
-Enough fat to make approximately 70 bars of soap
-Enough iron to make a two inch nail
-Enough carbon for 9,000 pencil points
-A spoonful of magnesium
I weigh more than 70 kilograms.

And I remember a TV series called Cosmos. Carl Sagan would walk around on a set that was meant to look like space, speaking in large numbers. On one of the shows he sat in front of a tank full of all the substances human beings are made of. He stirred the tank with a stick wondering if he would be able to create life.
He didn’t succeed.”
― Erlend Loe, Naïve. Super