Ariana

“There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“solitude can be a catalyst to innovation.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“What makes this all the more discomforting is not merely the bad stuff—the carbon emissions whose consequences we are finally starting to understand, the particulate pollution in our cities and the plastic waste in our seas—but the good stuff too. It is the billions of lives lived thanks to oil and gas. It is the fact that oil and gas are so useful as well as so destructive.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization