Ezra

“That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.”
― Milo Todd, The Lilac People

“Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: “Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.” Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity— which I wonder whether I belong to —really had a very vivid imagination.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“They try to convince people that you're the only group they're after, when really, you're just the first one. They look for the first domino to knock down, the one people will give the least resistance to, the one they care about the least. And once they've done it, it might be too late for everyone else.”
― Milo Todd, The Lilac People

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library