Kayla B

“During her lifetime, people across the globe furiously debated whether [Blavatsky] was a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three. Born in Russia in 1831, Blavatsky was short and fat with bulging eyes and folds of skin falling from her multiple chins. Her face was so broad that some people suspected she was a man. She professed to be a virgin; in fact, she had two husbands and an illegitimate son, and an apostle of asceticism. She smoked up to 200 cigarettes a day and swore like a solider.”
― David Grann, Simon Schuster Ltd The Lost City of Z A Legendary British Explorers Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon.

“One feels the man's power as an augmentation of his character; he cannot make an empty gesture or say a world that is not listened to. He knows it, and the knowledge gives him more reality than most people own: a solidness of being, a substantiality, a human grandeur.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“He was trained to be an apostle of Western civilization: to go forth and convert the world to capitalism and Christianity, to transform pastures into plantations and huts into hotels, to introduce to those living in the stone age, the marvels of the steam engine and locomotive, and to ensure that the sun never set on the British empire.”
― David Grann, Simon Schuster Ltd The Lost City of Z A Legendary British Explorers Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon.

“risk seeking; she'd always assumed that had been a necessary precondition for the sort of xenophilia that made a person fall in love with a culture that was slowly eating her own”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace