Pete

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“The sun was peeking over a row of beeches like a pastoral equivalent of the classic graffiti of Kilroy and his wall, and the owls of the valley had just handed the avian noise baton over to the Dawn Chorus. This morning the band, which was rapidly becoming one of my all-time favourite British ones, right up there with Led Zeppelin, Pentangle and the Stones, was working on a fuller sound: lots of new session players were chipping in and trying out new ideas, including a pheasant, the ensemble’s answer to a notoriously unreliable bagpipe player who stumbles in, still drunk from the night before, blows a couple of off-kilter notes, then leaves. Still in my pyjamas,”
― Tom Cox, 21st-Century Yokel

“A collection of Russian matryoshka dolls painted brightly in red and blue peeked out at me expectantly from one of the shelves. I couldn’t resist opening one, revealing a smaller doll inside. I opened that too, on and on until I had five dolls, each decreasing in size, all made to perfectly fit inside the largest one. It was exactly how I felt: a fully formed woman, but the little girl inside was still there.”
― Evie Woods, The Lost Bookshop

“The Internet just conned me into wishing it, because the Internet knows that humans like to share stuff, and that sharing stuff often comes from a kind place and carries the promise of bringing us all closer, so it gets us all addicted to the process, but leaves us ultimately emptier as a result, hovering in a state of non-presentness, getting nostalgic for stuff that happened barely any time ago that we didn’t even take the time to properly absorb when it did happen, skimming across everything, not quite fully experiencing any of it. But the Internet is also teeming with good intentions and seductive promises, and that is the problem.”
― Tom Cox, 21st-Century Yokel