Laura

“Once we have witnessed the suffering, the injustice, the immorality, what do we do next? Do we tell our eyes to forget what they have seen, tell our mouths to not whisper a word, tell our hearts to go numb, slowly? Or de we choose to speak up, speak out, connect, organise, mobilese and demand justice until justice is served?”
― Elif Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

“[Quoting her grandmother] 'We inherit our circumstances, we improve them for the next generation. I had little education, I wanted you to do better. Now you need to make sure your daughter has more than you had. Isn’t this the natural way of the world?”
― Elif Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

“The single most valuable human trait, the one quality every schoolchild and adult should be taught to nurture, is, quite simply, kindness.

Kindness. If you prefer, compassion. Even benevolence. It is the quality that makes people lovely. If that sounds rather anaemic, it’s because it is the opposite of setting goals and learning how to persuade and close deals; the antithesis of self-reliance and get-what-you-want thinking which form the backbone of modern self-improvement. Its simplicity and obviousness mean that we forget it constantly when we try to impress people, yet it is the most impressive trait we can ever show. It has nothing to do with intelligence or witty banter. We make the mistake of thinking we have to be funny and clever among the ranks of the funny and clever, or match the more obvious qualities of people we would like to like us, when in fact few of us seek out in others those outward aspects of personality we ourselves emanate.”
― Derren Brown, Confessions of a Conjuror

“How could it be progress when the countryside was being stripped of its life, he wondered. Without successive generations of families keeping their feet on their own land, the countryside would be a dead place - a desert. A thousand efficient machines could never replace the joy and satisfaction that a man drew from hearing the laughter of his children playing in the fields as he tended his finca, no matter how small it might be.”
― Peter Kerr