Brendan Moody

“Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.”
― Thomas Hardy

“Some people in Italy today wonder if the Resistance had any real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation the question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological significance of the Resistance. It was a source of pride to know that we Europeans had not waited for liberation passively. I think that for the young Americans who were paying their tribute of blood for our freedom it was not useless to know that behind the lines there were Europeans who were already paying their debt.”
― Umberto Eco, Five Moral Pieces

“I hesitate to mention this social dimension of sexism, racism, and class since it can be so easily used as an escape hatch by those too tired, too annoyed, too harried, or too comfortable to want to change. But it is true that although people are responsible for their actions, they are not responsible for the social context in which they must act or the social resources available to them. All of us must perforce accept large chunks of our culture readymade; there is not enough energy and time to do otherwise. Even so, the results of such nonthought can be appalling. At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act in a way that is both sexist and racist, to maintain one’s class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.”
― Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

“I was unexpectedly, reluctantly, wholly in love, not just any love but a consuming love, an unwanted love, an inconvenient love, the kind of love that a man wants to be cured of, that makes a man feel ashamed of himself, only the more he denies it the more entangled he becomes, like one of those nautical knots that tightens with every pull. It felt like an infection, a sudden illness, in which everything is at once the same as it was before and yet transformed. Being in love is a kind of hypnosis and, as any hypnotist will tell you, to be hypnotized one must secretly want to be hypnotized, so secretly that one doesn’t even know it. Falling in love is an act of involuntary will.”
― Alex Landragin, Crossings