Bionic Jean

“Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale: On Writers and Writing

“Looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”
― George Orwell, Essays

“It's easy to be cynical about death when you're young. When you are young, death is an anomaly. It's not real. It only affects other people. It's a bullet you'll dodge easily. It's why young people can go into battle: they really will live forever. They know.

As you stick around, as you go around the Earth, you realize that life is an ever-narrowing conveyor belt. Slowly, inexorably, it takes us all along with it, and one by one we tumble off the side of the conveyor belt into darkness. . .

They fall off the conveyor belt into the darkness, our friends, and we cannot talk to them anymore.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

“That’s what I dislike most of all in people—cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead