Rhyan Pearson

“Truth was, he did like the armadillos. He found them funny—bumbling yet sincere. He’d read in a nature guide that armadillos “swam” by walking across the bottoms of rivers and holding their breath, a detail that had captivated him.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“how far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way? My fictional chief of the British Service—I called him Control—had no doubt of the answer: “I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?” Today, the same man, with better teeth and hair, and a much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic illegal war in Iraq, or justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means of interrogation in the twenty-first century, or defending the inalienable right of closet psychopaths to bear semiautomatic weapons and the use of unmanned drones as a risk-free method of assassinating one’s perceived enemies and anybody who has the bad luck to be standing near them. Or, as a loyal servant of his corporation, assuring us that smoking is harmless to the health of the Third World and great banks are there to serve the public. What have I learned over the last fifty years? Come to think of it, not much. Just that the morals of the secret world are very like our own. John le Carré”
― John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

“The shock of going from being the center of attention to being out of it entirely—that still pulled at Saul at unexpected times. But there had been no drama to his collapsed ministry in the north, no shocking revelation, beyond the way he would be preaching one thing and thinking another, mistaking that conflict, for the longest time, as a manifestation of his guilt for sins both real and imagined. And one awful day he’d realized, betrayed by his passion, that he was becoming the message.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead