T. Aching

“We can know nothing about what is outside us, if we overlook ourselves,' he thinks now, 'the universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.”
― Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar

“The answer is that, some time in the twentieth century, the left traded freedom for other things. In the East (from Russia to China, Cambodia and Vietnam), the quest for emancipation was swapped for a totalitarian egalitarianism. In the West, liberty was left to its enemies, abandoned in exchange for an ill-defined notion of fairness. The moment people believed they had to choose between freedom and fairness, between and iniquitous democracy and miserable state-imposed egalitarianism, it was game over for the left.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“At this point the only thing Palomar can do was erase from his mind all models and the models of models. When this step is also taken, then he finds himself face to face with reality – hard to master and impossible to homogenize – as he formulates his 'yesses' and his 'noes', his 'buts'. To do this, it is better for the mind to remain cleared, furnished only by the memory of fragments of experience and of principles understood and not demonstrable. This is not a line of conduct from which he can derive special satisfaction, but it is the only one that proves practicable for him.”
― Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar

“Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy