Ian

“Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on—to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences—really works. After a few years of doing that pretty much daily, you’ve forged the strongest possible armor to defend against fear: hard-won competence.

Our training pushes us to develop a new set of instincts: instead of reacting to danger with a fight-or-flight adrenaline rush, we’re trained to respond unemotionally by immediately prioritizing threats and methodically seeking to defuse them. We go from wanting to bolt for the exit to wanting to engage and understand what’s going wrong, then fix it.”
― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

“There is no happy medium to our food; it is either overcooked or undercooked, or it has too much salt or not enough, or there is not enough oil in the fried vegetables or there is so much that you almost fear that America will invade.”
― Petina Gappah, The Book of Memory

“Maybe it's not really lying if you barely know you're doing it. It should be true. It's the way it should be, in an ideal world.”
― Harriet Lane, Alys, Always

“He owns them more completely than if he had seized their balls in his hands”
― Nick Lake, In Darkness