Brittany

“In our American quest for comfort, our resilience muscle has been weekend. In our desire to have things "quick and easy," we have atrophied our ability to thrive and survive. So we now have quick, and we now have easy, but we have less strength to cope with life when it become difficult.”
― Bethany Haley Williams, The Color of Grace: How One Woman's Brokenness Brought Healing and Hope to Child Survivors of War

“Say what you will, ’tis better to be left than never to have been loved.”
― William Congreve

“War is a poor word. Is it war when people find an infestation of vermin in some unwanted place and try to burn or poison it clean? Though that, too, is a poor metaphor, because no one hates individual mice or bedbugs. No one singles out for vengeance that one, that one right there, three-legged splotch-backed little bastards don't have much chance of becoming more than an annoyance to people-- whereas you and all your kind have cracked the surface of the planet and lost the Moon. If the mice in your garden, back in Tirimo, had helped Jija kill Uche, you would have shaken the place to pebbles and set fire to the ruins before you left. You destroyed Tirimo anyway, but if it had been personal, you'd have done worse.
Yet for all your hatred, you still might not have managed to kill the vermin. The survivors would be greatly changed-- made harder, stronger, more splotch-backed. Perhaps the hardships you inflicted would have fissioned their descendants into many factions, each with different interests. Some of those interests would have nothing to do with you. Some would revere and despise you for your power. Some would be as dedicated to your destruction as you were to theirs, even though by the time they had the strength to actually act on their enmity, you would have forgotten their existence. To them, your enmity would be the stuff of legend.
And some might hope to appease you, or talk you around to at least a degree of peaceful tolerance. I am one of these.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“That is the moment I begin to despise the idea of fame. What does it do for the bearer of the laurel? Who cares if your name is in the paper? Who cares if you are mentioned as one of the top-ten cyclists, boxers, batters, painters, poets, artists, fly fishermen in the world? Who cares if your name is written in history books? When you have died you can't read those history books. When you have died the small trace you have left behind, even if you win a Tony, an Emmy, an Oscar, an election, will lose its vibrancy, fade into an outline. Oh yes, him, I heard of him, I knew someone who read him once. What difference does it make to the corpse if his books are in libraries or not in libraries? Who cares if his plays are revived on the summer-stock circuit for one hundred years? Isn't the simplest touch of a child's arm on the face more important, isn't the good meal, the brush against a thigh, a hand held during a movie, a swim in the sea, aren't those things of equal importance as the sands of time come rushing down on our heads burying ambition and love, good and evil, breath, blood, brains, waste, memory, alike in oblivion?”
― Anne Roiphe