Ian

“There is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable affliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid- what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”
― Hermann Melville

“Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk