Hannah

“Who gave a fuck, Kathy thought, no one liked Putin, likeability was irrelevant, what mattered was whether you could make people numb enough to change all the laws, change the entire system, that was the game. Once you pardoned a corrupt sheriff who'd openly run 'concentration camps' for Latinos you were probably well on the way.
Numbness mattered, it was what the Nazis did, made people feel like things were moving too fast to stop and though unpleasant and eventually terrifying and appalling, were probably impossible to do anything about.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“She missed the sense of time as something serious and diminishing, she didn't like living in the permanent present of the id.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beach somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the whole problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before segueing proudly into an account of taking a plane across America so the writer could cheer herself up by seeing monarch butterflies. On the plane she complained about the air pollution of jet fuel and perfume, how it gave her allergies, but she didn't connect the casual habit of flying thousands of miles with the collapse of the butterflies. Kathy didn't blame her. The equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn't quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its own eyes.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“For instance, have you ever heard a square-wheeled steam roller ride over a street full of hard-boiled eggs" he asked, and as he did, all that could be heard were loud crunching sounds.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth