Katherina

“Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don't expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“We have assumed that ancient houses were built like those of today – as weatherproof boxes for living in and raising families. So we have been very anxious to work out where people ate, slept and prepared their meals. It’s all about what happened where – and we have discovered a great deal. But revealing where people slept or prepared their food makes little sense if we don’t also try to appreciate what it was that motivated them to get out of bed every morning.”
― Francis Pryor, Scenes from Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the Coming of the Romans

“We don't make reality. We evade it. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library