Karlie

“Aren’t humans absurd? I suppose we like praise for its own sake. The way children like ice cream. It’s an inferiority complex, that’s what it is. Praise assuages our insecurities. And ridiculously so. How could I rise in my own opinion? Don’t I know myself—”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“For she was young, and whether she knew it or not she was torn between two worlds, that of her lineage, which she bore like a weight, and everything that awaited out there beyond the ocean. One knew just by looking at her that she would have to go sometime. She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience.”
― Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow

“You are going to be hanged. ‘Tis a very simple matter, gentlemen and honest bourgeois! as you treat our people in your abode, so we treat you in ours! The law which you apply to vagabonds, vagabonds apply to you. ‘Tis your fault if it is harsh.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally ‘pure’. Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover