Ellie

“All war is absurd. For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It’s all a little strange, if you think about it.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

“There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you. He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Ah, the suburbs: that slice of America where we name subdivisions after the trees we've cut down to build them, where we've zoned out any hope of a bookstore or a restaurant within walking distance, where we slave over lawns that we seldom use, where our front porches are too shallow for a porch swing, where we walk the dogs but can't walk to lunch, where we don't really get to know the neighbors because nobody's planning to stick around for more than a few years, where the dominant feature of every house is the two-car garage door, where getting to know people is tougher than it needs to be because there's no village pub, no local bakery, no farmer's market—in other words, no casual gathering point where it's possible to bump into neighbors in an organic way.”
― Andrew Peterson, The God of the Garden: Thoughts on Creation, Culture, and the Kingdom

“Illegitimi non carborundum. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War