Noah Nelson

“The bigger the entity and the more things it touches, the more susceptible it is to forces beyond its control. Maintaining stability requires far more work than formenting instability. Analysts of modern terrorism wring their hands over a version of the same dilemma: governments can win only by defending everywhere; terrorists can win by succeeding anywhere.”
― Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America

“He presses the triggers. And like roses in his hands, death blooms.”
― Jay Kristoff, Illuminae

“I: You’re a communist then. S: Let’s say I’m old enough not to be dazzled by Ayn Rand.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a remember of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.
This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches