Helen

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
― Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

“Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us. Why should I yield to their power and let them tell me what to think?”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“It’s the only way of looking at it. Guilt is pointless. Guilt is our way of legitimizing self-cruelty. It’s a basic human tendency to take pleasure in inflicting suffering, but seeing as we shouldn’t inflict suffering upon others—and seeing as we cannot harm the divine, even if we wanted to—what do we do? We turn on ourselves. We make ourselves suffer instead. We feel guilt.”
― David Hopen, The Orchard