Fanabana

“This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason—the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity”—and we also contain the antidote to that disease—courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“I guess I've just realized recently that I've been obsessed with this idea that you speak of - getting what one deserves, or not - it has made me bitter. But that's because it doesn't make any sense to begin with. What you deserve and what you get: there's no way to measure them. You get the world and the world gets you, who's swindling whom?”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Hell's not so bad for the people who are in it. They're exactly where they wanted to be.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Misfortune shouldn’t be a punishment, just as happiness shouldn’t be a reward.”
― Bo-Young Kim, I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories