Linza Torte

“swarm.”
― Margaret George, Helen of Troy

“She wanted it to appear to any casual observer that she merely had a headache or was perhaps resting her eyes for a moment. The problem was more serious: she had forgotten how to read. This happened almost daily and she was used to it—she understood it to be a side effect of being unable to stand her job—but lately it had been happening earlier and earlier in the day. The mornings went quickly but the afternoons were deadly. Time slowed and expanded. She wanted to run. By four p.m. she sometimes had to correct the same paper three times. She reread words over and over again, she broke them down into individual syllables, she stared, but if you stare at any word for long enough it loses all meaning and goes abstract. She had had this job for some weeks now, ever since she’d been exiled without explanation from Anton Waker’s research department, and it was becoming gradually less tenable each day.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer's Gun

“I believe there are more good people in the world than bad people. What does not follow, though, is that, thanks to the numbers, the good will prevail. What cannot be left out of account is that, under certain circumstances, the bad can get the good to act badly, and furthermore, in order to achieve certain goals—victory in wartime, for example—getting the good to act badly rises to the level of a necessity.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning