Mark Robison

“The commissioner has requested permission to use water cannon against the civilian population for the first time in British history—” “Although it has been used in Northern Ireland,” the interviewer chipped in. “Yes, in very specific circumstances.” And who cares about the Paddies anyway? I filled in silently. As usual, what was perfectly acceptable in Belfast or Derry would be an outrage in Southwark.”
― Jane Casey, The Kill

“For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time—about two hundred milliseconds, one-fifth of a second—for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted. One-fifth of a second is not a trivial span of time when a rapid response is required—to step back from an oncoming car, say, or to avoid a blow to the head. To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“Only someone in a position of dominance can permit himself to be calm and reasonable in any circumstance, because he’s not the one who is suffering.”
― Pauline Harmange, I Hate Men

“When a woman is assaulted, one of the first questions people ask is, Did you say no? This question assumes that the answer was always yes, and that it is her job to revoke the agreement. To defuse the bomb she was given. But why are they allowed to touch us until we physically fight them off? Why is the door open until we have to slam it shut?”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir