Sgfrisch

“Before I was not a witch, / but now I am one.”
― Louise Penny, The Black Wolf

“in the truthless precincts of social media.”
― Daniel Silva, An Inside Job

“The villa stood on the highest point of the cape, shielded from view by towering hedgerows and protected by security measures worthy of the Palais de l’Élysée. There were twelve bedrooms, sixteen bathrooms, eight assorted drawing rooms and parlors, two professional kitchens, a library and adjoining office suite, a wine cellar, a cinema, a discotheque, a game room, a hotel-sized spa and fitness center, a Turkish bath and sauna, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a red clay tennis court, a caretaker’s villa, a ten-car garage, and a man-made lake patrolled by a flotilla of snow-white mute swans. Upon its many walls hung a portion of the owner’s collection of fine art. Some of his best pictures, however, adorned his mansion in Highgate, which had been seized, along with its contents, by the British government. He had more than a hundred paintings stashed in the Geneva Freeport and a dozen more hidden aboard Anastasia, his eighty-five-meter superyacht. At present the vessel was moored in Golfe-Juan, which he could see from the window of his private study on the second floor. It was never the life Alexander Prokhorov could have imagined for himself when he was a boy in the Soviet Union, but he had come to believe it was the life he deserved. He had worked harder and been more resourceful, he assured himself, had seen opportunity where others saw only collapse and ruin. And he had become rich as a tsar in the process, a billionaire many times over. Had he cut corners and broken laws? Yes, of course. He had also resorted to violence on occasion. But so had many other men like him, men who had dared to stake their claim in the Wild East. He had nothing but contempt for those who were too”
― Daniel Silva, An Inside Job

“Fear makes us selfish,” Katherine said. “The more we fear death, the more we cling to ourselves, our belongings, our safe spaces…to that which is familiar. We exhibit increased nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance. We flout authority, ignore social mores, steal from others to provide for ourselves, and become more materialistic. We even abandon our feelings of environmental responsibility because we sense the planet is a lost cause and we’re all doomed anyway.”
― Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets