

“Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives – to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death – and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies.”
― Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
― Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“We had old architects and were working with what we had on hand. You’ve hired this new, young architect now, and, Pericles, I’m going to build you a statue of Athena—all gold and ivory, think of that, Pericles—and taller than our city walls.” Pericles raised his eyes toward the birds.”
― Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece
― Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and Melba Toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love.”
― Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories
― Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories
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