Aditya Pareek

“Flow my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled forever let me mourn;
Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“That Russia would become such a power in the world had been foreseen as long ago as the 1830s by Alexis de Tocqueville, who said, in a famous passage from Democracy in America, that even then, “There are on earth today two great peoples, who, from different points of departure, seem to be advancing toward the same end. They are the Anglo-Americans and the Russians. . . . All the other peoples appear to have attained approximately their natural limits, and to have nothing left but to conserve their positions; but these two are growing. . . . To attain his end, the first depends on the interest of the individual person, and allows the force and intelligence of individuals to act freely, without directing them. The second in some way concentrates all the power of society in one man. The one has liberty as the chief way of doing things; the other servitude. Their points of departure are divergent; nevertheless, each seems summoned by a secret design of providence to hold in his hands, some day, the destinies of half the world.”
― Charles L. Mee Jr., Saving a Continent: The Untold Story of the Marshall Plan

“Revolutions are like earthquakes: they are always being predicted, and sometimes they come.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“and the water and the grass and the white ripples on grey water, and white clouds among grey clouds and the wrinkled young silver skin of the water and life-bright lichens on black branches and on the still, bright river, a man and woman slowly poling their log canoe and the spiderweb (golden-green seed-wings already growing above the darker leaves of maples this early in August) and the smell of evergreens and the living grass, then the dying grass, brighter than an Indian basket”
― William T. Vollmann, The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War