Marcella Wigg

“I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. [in response to Rousseau's "The Social Contract"]”
― Voltaire

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin