Bjorn

“Creativity eventually comes from the need not to have ourselves or other people eaten by leopards.”
― John Scalzi

“This quote is often falsely attributed to Mark Twain.”
― Randall Munroe

“The honeyed sweetness of Mengele, of his words and of his smile, which he hoped would endow him with some resemblance to the Angel of Death, is the genuine, imbecile expression of every kind of fascination with evil; it is the expression featured in every demi-culture that expects the shoddy junk of the shadows to make amends for its own paltriness. The prohibited act, often as trite as throwing rubbish out of the window, is no less obtuse just because it torments or tortures. The Gorgon, said Joseph Roth about Nazism, is banal. Mengele's victims are characters in a tragedy, but Mengele himself is a figure in a farrago of gibberish.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“In the library of the observatory in Ondrejov, above Prague, I once found a catalogue of stars that astounded me. It had hundreds of pages with tables of stars that had been observed and confirmed to exist. Towards the end there was a table of stars thought to have been observed but confirmed to not exist. But to my astonishment, at the back of the volume I found a list of stars which had never been observed and did not exist.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the universe is that we could create an infinite catalogue of things, worlds and beings that no one has seen and which do not exist. Each story in the realm of fiction is a small part of that catalogue.”
― Peter Nilson, Stjärnvägar: En bok om kosmos