Chuma

“He had always been thin, but there he was reduced to nothing but skin and bones. His skin was burned by the unrelenting sun, salt, and sand, his features sharpened: he was a Giacometti sculpture in cast iron.”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“The pressure to define civil war is often inversely related to the political stakes for offering such a definition: the higher the pressure to be precise, the greater the chance that exactitude will itself be a source of political contention.”
― David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas

“You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“A great deal has been written on the question of how to motivate industrial workers. Presumably such literature arises because so many jobs have been made so trivial that few people can find any meaning at all in them. It may be that techniques of management alone can't cure the problem. But clearly, for even the most potentially interesting jobs to be meaningful, there must be managers who are willing to throw away the management handbooks and take some risks.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine