Penny Shalam

“I knew something was wrong the minute he didn’t come home,’ says Jo. ‘He always rang. Always.
Jo is adamant he would have found a way to call her and let her know what was happening. ‘He would have found a phone and rung me. He had every intention of coming home.”
― Nicole Morris, Vanished: True Stories from Families of Australian Missing Persons

“At the edge of the field Silva and Stefan witnessed heartrending images in greyscale as thousands of desperate refugees streamed down the road in leaden shades of melancholy.  This somber line of tired and dirty humans moved so close together that they jostled each other with each step; their random movements reminded Silva of corks bobbing in a slow moving stream.  They watched them pass from the side of the road, but eventually fell-in, trudging along with the suffering others, feeling safer in numbers, hoping for a destination worth finding.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta

“And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh.”
― Tim O'Brien

“A culture that has a moral compass which always points toward the elite’s conception of good—or a society’s default conceptions of “good”—has a broken moral compass. Compasses have value because they point toward a single magnetic North, not a moving position.”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing