John

“If you're reading this book, there is probably an artist or band whose music you have an intense personal relationship with. I would also guess that this artist or band came into your life during a time when you were highly vulnerable. if this is the case, this artist or band might be the closest thing you had to a confidant. in fact, he, she, or it was better than a confidant, because his/her/its music articulated your own thoughts and feeling better than you ever could. This music elevated the raw materials of your life to the heights of art and poetry. It made you feel as if your personal experience was grander and more meaningful than it might otherwise have been. And naturally you attributed whatever that music was doing to your heart and brain to the people who made the music, and you came to believe that the qualities of the music were also true of the music's creators. "If this music understands me, then the people behind the music must also understand me," goes this line of thought.”
― Steven Hyden, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life

“32 Another study concluded that literary fiction “uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters’ subjective experiences.”33 That’s to say, if you read novels, you can probably read emotions, vital skills for forming cooperative societies.”
― Gaia Vince, Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time

“But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on, "is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist