Fatima Sarder

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time”
― Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

“The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies…. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself.”
― Amanda Montell, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

“There’s an alphabet in things, and it’s no coincidence. If you pay attention, if you really look, you’ll see that all around you is an architecture of letters, emerging from the shapes of things. It seems almost obvious: our sense of vision is much more alert to lines, to contrasts, than to the flat or formless surfaces that contain them. What’s happening at the edges, the borders, the interstices—that’s what strikes our eyes.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“The decisions being made in today’s world that really matter are not being made in Paris, London, Berlin or Rome—as they were a hundred years ago—but in Beijing and Moscow, in Tehran and Riyadh, in Delhi and Islamabad, in Kabul and in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, in Ankara, Damascus and Jerusalem.”
― Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads: The New Asia and the Remaking of the World Order