Alesha

“It is your memento moron: no matter how smart and excellent, remember that you, too, will fuck up.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change THE world, but they can change many individual worlds.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“Having acknowledged that a man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them, the Count thought it worth considering how one was most likely to achieve this aim when one had been sentenced to a life of confinement.

For Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d'If, it was thoughts of revenge that kept him clear minded. Unjustly imprisoned, he sustained himself by plotting the systematic undoing of his personal agents of villainy. For Cervantes, enslaved by pirates in Algiers, it was the promise of pages as yet unwritten that spurred him on. While for Napoleon on Elba, strolling among chickens, fending off flies, and sidestepping puddles of mud, it was visions of a triumphal return to Paris that galvanized his will to persevere.

But the Count hadn't the temperament for revenge; he hadn't the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn't the fanciful ego to dream of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the Count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of PRACTICALITIES. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world's Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teacher themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island's topography, its climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel