mzmsary

“Back home, Connell’s shyness never seemed like much of an obstacle to his social life, because everyone knew who he was already, and there was never any need to introduce himself or create impressions about his personality. If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced. Now he has a sense of invisibility, nothingness, with no reputation to recommend him to anyone.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It's certainly true that Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population. The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor and then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded, as the interviews in this book attest, to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor core was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding areas, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under control. . . In the week after the accident, while refusing to admit to the world that anything really serious had gone wrong, the Soviets poured thousands of men into the breach. . . The machines they brought broke down because of the radiation. The humans wouldn't break down until weeks or months later, at which point they'd die horribly.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured, It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“He said that I had creative talent, but what I really needed to do
if I wanted to be successful was to become technical. He said that just about
anyone can become technical, but not everyone can be creative. And there are
a lot of creative people who never get anywhere because they don't have
technical skills. Part of what makes a person creative is his lack of emphasis
on things technical. My boss said that if you are someone who is already
creative, and then you become technical, then you are unstoppable. I like that.
Creative and technical.”
― Robert Rodríguez, Rebel Without a Crew, or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player