Laura

“Robert F. Kennedy called on Americans to look at our economy in a radically different way. “Our gross national product is now over $800 billion a year,” he said, “but that GNP—if we should judge America by that—counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets.”
― Arianna Huffington, Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream

“When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.”
― William Golding

“Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation