Joe Kessler

“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

“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

“The Library of Congress archives memes now, preserving things like the Lolcat Bible, Urban Dictionary, and Know Your Meme. It calls them, charmingly and also not entirely inaccurately, “folklore.”
― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

“The study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian