El

“It is not true that fate slips silently into our lives. It steps in through the door that we have opened, and we invite it to enter.”
― Sándor Márai, Embers

“Everything is happening and has happened and will happen again. Everything that exists has always existed and will continue to exist. Memory is imagined; it is not real. Don’t be ashamed of its need to create; it is the loveliest part of your heart. Myth is the true history. Don’t let them tell you that there are no monsters. Don’t let them make you feel stupid, just because you are happy to play down in the dark with your flashlight. The mystical world depends on you and your tolerance for the absurd.”
― Nick Cave, The Sick Bag Song

“Yes, vanity … and yet self-respect is what gives a person his or her intrinsic value”
― Sándor Márai, Embers

“We also know how dangerous it is to simplify society by the use of examples in nature. However, many Americans still value the honey bee as a symbol of thrift and industry. This value seems to be one of the lingering philosophies from seventeenth-century England, in which the royal authorities and clergy dictated that the lower classes and unemployed should be “busy as bees” so they would not rebel. When the English began to label their own members of society as “drones,” they privileged a new set of values based on work, thrift, and efficiency. The American Dream still seems to be based on these very values. And if somehow people do not attain the American Dream, we tend to think that they have not worked hard enough or did not save their money—in short, they are too much like drones. It could be argued that many American social policies—so conscious of work, labor, and time—are still based on the beehive model first adopted during the seventeenth century in England. For all its rhetoric of new opportunities, America still sees poverty as a sin, as if somehow the poor aren’t thrifty or busy as bees.”
― Tammy Horn