Lu

“They’d simply left the dead where they’d fallen, bleeding across the bricks and pages, were simply stepping around them on their way to excavate the library. Was this their petty revenge, retribution for a lifetime of inconvenience? Or did they simply not care?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“the times I always regret are missed opportunities to say farewell to good people, to wish them long life and say to them in all sincerity, “You build and do not destroy; you sow goodwill and reap it; smiles bloom in the wake of your passing, and I will keep your kindness in trust and share it as occasion arises, so that your life will be a quenching draught of calm in a land of drought and stress.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hammered

“you talked out the side of your mouth, in case your lips got chapped. Maybe that was why the West of Scotland was where people put the head on one another—it was too cold to take your hands out your pockets. But it did have compensations. Laidlaw had a happy image of the first man out after the nuclear holocaust being a Glaswegian. He would straighten up and look around. He would dust himself down with that flicking gesture of the hands and, once he had got the strontium off the good suit, he would look up. The palms would be open. ‘Hey,’ he would say. ‘Gonny gi’es a wee brek here? What was that about? Ye fell oot wi’ us or what? That was a liberty. Just you behave.’ Then he would walk off with that Glaswegian walk, in which the shoulders don’t move separately but the whole torso is carried as one, as stiff as a shield. And he would be muttering to himself, ‘Must be a coupla bottles of something still intact.”
― William McIlvanney, The Papers of Tony Veitch

“The fundamentalist (or, more accurately, the beleaguered individual who comes to embrace fundamentalism) cannot stand freedom. He cannot find his way into the future, so he retreats to the past. He returns in imagination to the glory days of his race and seeks to reconstitute both them and himself in their purer, more virtuous light. He gets back to basics. To fundamentals.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art