Marina

“If you want to minimize the risk of catastrophe, you focus on the process much more than the outcome.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Proximity to normalcy is a nice turn of phrase; you ought do a needlepoint, frame it and shove it straight up your ass. Keep it there with the rest of your wisdom.”
― Richard Kadrey, Hollywood Dead

“We want to get behind the beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that reflects to us our own desire for good. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a sorrowfully irritating mystery. We want to feed on it, but it is only an object we can look on; it appears to us from a certain distance. The great sorrow of human life is knowing that to look and to eat are two different operations. Only on the other side of heaven, where God lives, are they one and the same operation. Children already experience this sorrow when they look at a cake for a long time and nearly regret eating it, but are powerless to help themselves. Maybe the vices, depravities and crimes are nearly always or even always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what one can only look at. Eve initiated this. If she lost our humanity by eating a fruit, the reverse attitude— looking at a fruit without eating it— must be what saves.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“That was one way in which the sexes had never been equal; they were not equally dangerous.”
― Stephen King, Sleeping Beauties