Megan

“The word I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“[T]he erasure of our elderwomen in general is part of what Sheehy describes as "a conspiracy of silence which has hidden the fact of how much power older women potentially wield." Power, remember, that lies partly in the fact that women over age fifty are no longer primarily caregivers and are therefore free to play more of an active role in society at large—and that is equally born from experience and the accumulation of common sense.
Once a person has taken a few turns around the block, it becomes much harder to hoodwink them into going against their own best interests. Having lived long enough to have overcome their fair share of traumas, and to have gotten the measure of how the world works, will also make a person far less likely to believe in the next quick fix or "miracle cure." They are more likely to retire their subscription to the capitalist credo of keeping up appearances and start living by their own playbook instead.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Fiction harmless? Look at religion. Fiction harmless? Look at the oppressed masses content with their lot because they have embraced the lies imposed on them. History itself is just a fiction-a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget. That's what it is. And how is reality funded? With yet another fiction: money. Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we've all agreed to support. Unanimously. We can differ on other matters, like creed or political affiliations, but we all agree on the fiction of money and that this abstraction represents concrete goods. Any goods. Look it up. It's all in Marx. Money, he says, is not one thing. It is, potentially, all things. And for this reason it is unrelated to all things.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust