Isabel Brady

“History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going – it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Δ v would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“You know, that might be the answer—to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.” “Do you think it will work?” “I’m sure it will. And let’s promote him to captain, too, just to make certain.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he used as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“What is truth?" Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century