Leigh

“The flatness was stultifying. She wouldn’t say this aloud because in light of other worries it seemed self-indulgent, but Willa missed mountains. Missed them hard, with the psychic equivalent of a toothache.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered

“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

“I suppose it is in our nature,” she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered

“Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you’re fifteen years old”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown