Ian Martin

“But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“people will always choose a simple lie over a complicated truth, because the lie has one unbeatable advantage: the truth always has to stick to what actually happened, whereas the lie just has to be easy to believe.”
― Fredrik Backman, Us Against You

“Wine, on the other hand, is like religion: it’s mysterious, sometimes literally opaque, and there are too many kinds of it. You never really know if a particular wine is good or bad; you just have to take it on faith from some judgy wine priest, an initiate to its mysteries. And wine is also like religion because the people who really get into it tend to be fucking unbearable.”
― John Hodgman, Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

“You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul—not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those who knew you.”
― Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding