Margarita

“We live in a culture that is constantly amping us up with stress and stimulation.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“If you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn’t kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“Why do you think this writing of yours, this graphomania in a flimsy cave, this scribbling back and forth and up and down over the walls of what is beginning to seem like a prison, is capable of protecting anyone at all, yourself included? It’s an illusion—the belief that your doodling is a kind of armor, a kind of charm—because no one knows better than you do how fragile your tent really is. Already there’s a clomping of leather-covered feet, there’s a scratching, there’s a scrabbling, there’s a sound of rasping breath. Wind comes in. Your candle tips over and flares up and a loose tent flap catches fire, and through the widening black-edged gap, you can see the eyes of the howlers, red and shining, and the light from your burning paper shelter. But you keep writing anyway, because what else can you do?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“She ranted about how evil doesn't know it is evil, like the mad don't know they're insane. That America doesn't think it has invaded too many democracies and killed too many innocents. That we shouldn't let them slaughter like the worst tyrants and drop bombs on children. That there's nothing exceptional about a country built on genocide and the backs of slaves.”
― Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida