Barbara

“Barb Miller
Fri, Jun 21, 4:40 PM (3 days ago)
to me

How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live? She thinks of Maria, who owned so little and who left so quietly, and of Licinius telling her about the Greeks camped outside the walls of Troy for ten years, and of the Trojan women trapped inside, weaving and worrying, wondering whether they would ever walk the fields or swim in the sea again, or whether the gates would fall, and they would have to watch their babies be tossed over the ramparts to die.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“He’d known for a long time by then that the world’s changes wouldn’t be reversed, but still, the realization cast his memories in a sharper light. The last time I ate an ice-cream cone in a park in the sunlight. The last time I danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane that hadn’t been repurposed as living quarters, an airplane that actually took off. The last time I ate an orange.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“At the very least,” she’d written to me once, “when we die we will be as if asleep, in the same place we were before birth, so why fear death? Scattered on the wind, unaware as we were before we came into this world, with no memory of any of it.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty – A #1 NYT Bestselling History

“When Flora got married, she was fourteen. Now she has three kids and the village wells are dry and the nearest reliable water source is a two-hour walk from her home. Here in the Funhalouro District adolescent moms like Flora spend about six hours a day searching for and transporting water. Yesterday she walked three hours to harvest water lilies from a lake so her kids would have something to eat. And what do our most enlightened leaders suggest we do? Switch to e-billing. Buy three LED bulbs and get a free tote bag. Earth has eight billion people to feed and the extinction rate is a thousand times higher than it was at pre-human levels. This is not something we fix with tote bags.

Excerpt from: "Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel" by Anthony Doerr. Scribd.
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― Doerr Anthony