Esther Daang

“Thought you were going to be in touch. Where were you?"

"Where? There aren't places anymore, duck," he responded. "No locations now, just individuals. You didn't hear? Everyone's their own nation, with their own blog. Because everybody has something important to say; everybody's putting out press releases on what they ate for breakfast. It's the era of self-importance. Everyone's their own world. Doesn't matter where people are. Or where I was."

"Nicely dodged.”
― Tom Rachman, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“I wanted to show, as Tooly's life enfolds [in The Rise & Fall of Great Powers], how one's earliest stories condition how one encounters the world: what one expects of strangers, whether one counts on justice, whether one veers into cynicism or veers back again.”
― Tom Rachman, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.”
― Tom Rachman

“- Plan F, we follow Plan F, right now.
- Is that the one where we run away?
- Not at all. It's the one where we beat a dignified emergency retreat.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Whispering Skull