Julia

“Abdul’s father had developed an irritating habit of talking about the future as if it were a bus: “It’s moving past and you think you’re going to miss it but then you say, wait, maybe I won’t miss it—I just have to run faster than I’ve ever run before. Only now we’re all tired and damaged, so how fast can we really run? You have to try to catch it, even when you know you’re not going to catch it, when maybe it’s better just to let it go —”
― Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

“Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire—because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind—when people hate those they have hurt.”
― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

“The shrink they make me see, she taps her pencil and frowns at me. And she talks about how we construct our ideals out of our own past mistakes. And I wonder what exactly a mistake is. A thing we should not have done, right? But if learning is built on trial and error there can be no mistakes, only rungs on a ladder to someplace better.”
― Chris Whitaker, All the Colors of the Dark

“The history of biological interventions designed to correct for previous biological interventions reads like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, in which the Cat, after eating cake in the bathtub, is asked to clean up after himself:
Do you know how he did it?
WITH MOTHER’S WHITE DRESS!
Now the tub was all clean,
But her dress was a mess!”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future