Kevin Tole

“The truth is like a gnarled tree, made up of many layers that are twisted all around each other, some layers holding others inside them, sometimes being held. The truth is something that can be expressed in many tales, for it is like that garden the sages entered, in which each of them saw something else.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

“History in the unceasing extent to understand what it is that has happened alongside all that might have happened as well or instead.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

“Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or the reader's. Variables are the spice of life. [If] you like you can read [a lot of] science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Library of America Ursula K. Le Guin Edition

“Before 1999, the great powers had intervened three times in the Balkans. The first was the Congress of Berlin in 1878 when European diplomats agreed to replace Ottoman power by building a system of competing alliances on the Balkan Peninsula. The second began with the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia in the summer of 1914 and culminated in 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne and the Great Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey. The third started with Italy’s unprovoked attack on Greece in March 1940 and ended with the consolidation of unrepresentative pro-Soviet regimes in Bulgaria, Romania and a pro-Western administration in Greece…… And the violence that these interventions encouraged, often inflicted by one Balkan people on another, ensured the continuation of profound civil and nationalist strife.”
― Misha Glennie