David Sasaki

“There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind