Joe Kessler

“Rather than being uniformly antisemitic in outlook, the German population was very much divided over the Nazis' antisemitic policies. Some found them distasteful. Others plied them enthusiastically. Most were probably ambivalent or indifferent. Nevertheless, many had sympathy for their Jewish neighbors, classmates, and coworkers. More than a few were capable of expressing this sympathy to the Jews in private, but far too few took public steps that could have altered Nazi policy and significantly eased the Jews' plight.”
― Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans

“Like how money is just squiggles on paper or on a screen until it determines whether you can eat lunch, words are just meat twitches until they determine whether you can get a job”
― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

“Mr. Benjamin shrugged his shoulders. "We have to live today," he said. "If you had a son, Harkavy, you'd want him to have a college education. Who's going to wait for the Messiah? They tell a story about a little town in the old country. It was out of the way, in a valley, so the Jews were afraid the Messiah would come and miss them, and they built a high tower and hired one of the town beggars to sit in it all day long. A friend of his meets this beggar and says, 'How do you like your job, Baruch?' So he says, 'It doesn't pay much, but I think it's steady work.”
― Saul Bellow, The Victim

“She was fast approaching thirty, and with that impending birthday the way she thought of her own life was beginning to change. When she was twenty, she thought of people in their thirties as, well, old: after all, they had lived as long as she had and half as long again, and so they must have been tired, with the beginnings of aches in their bones and the first intimations of their own mortality.

But the peculiar horror of growing older was not what she expected. In fact, she felt the same age as she had eight years ago, and twenty-eight years of life had managed to compress themselves into a life-span that once comfortably held twenty. It wasn't that she was getting older, but that the years were getting shorter, and were therefore more precious. You had to use them sparingly.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control