Melanie

“The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“You know why the battle of good vs evil is so one-sided, Malin? Because evil is better organised, better equipped and better paid. It is not monsters or yakas or demons we should fear. Organised collectives of evil doers who think they are performing the work of the righteous. That is what should make us shudder.”
― Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

“Immigration preserved the face of the helmeted road worker at the bottom of a hole in the highway, or that of the garbage collector beside a dumpster. Theirs was a purely economic existence, triumphantly assigned to them in a virtuous class debate each year by our students, who were convinced they possessed the best of all arguments against racism, i.e.: we need them for work that the French no longer want to do.”
― Annie Ernaux, The Years

“mind-exploding emoji!)”
― Elin Hilderbrand, The Hotel Nantucket