Daniel Flanagan

“We all love a good story, a concise explanation of how the world works. We all love an easy buck. Temptation has driven human folly for centuries, whether the serpent in the Garden of Eden or the market manias of cryptocurrency or artificial intelligence. Each wave seduces us into thinking that we’ve learned from history and, this time, we can’t be fooled. Then it happens again. This is how it happened in 1929.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“What good is it to be pretty?"

"Well. . . pretty things are rare in this life."

"But what good are they?"

"Well . . . pretty things . . . like flowers and sunsets
and rubies and pretty girls, too . . . they're like billboards telling us that life is good.”
― William Inge, Picnic

“Be men, or be more than men. be steady to your purposes, and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable, and cannot withstand you, if you say that it shall not.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The American Wasps form very fine paper, like ours; they extract the fiber of common wood of the countries where they live. They teach us that paper can be made from the fiber of plants without the use of rags and linen.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History