Lucía > Recent Status Updates

After a certain age, you can pretty much do whatever takes your fancy. No one tells you off, except for your doctors and your children.

Always look where the action isn’t, because that’s where the action is.

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up. Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer.

Now he had answers, but they weren’t doing what answers were supposed to do: they weren’t making things simpler or easier. They weren’t helping.

“You can’t just decide to be happy.”
“No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?”

He’d started that little speech speaking normally and he ended it shouting. In a way fighting like this was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.

(...)
He wasn’t even ashamed. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn’t matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaging in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold and immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence.
(...)

You'll know what to say when the time comes. That's the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.

You have this purity thing, but seriously, no one will care. There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all. The game is going to be completely original because we made it. If you have access to a tool that will help, there is no reason not to use that tool.

What was he missing? Or was it him? If he wasn’t happy even here, even now, did the flaw lie in him? As soon as he seized happiness it dispersed and reappeared somewhere else. Like Fillory, like everything good, it never lasted. What a terrible thing to know.

In the World Trade Organization, bargaining power depends largely on GDP, so the biggest economies almost always get their way. Democratising these institutions would ensure that global South countries have greater control over the decisions that affect them, and greater control over their own economic policy.

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

he would never get over it, but he’d figured out how to live with it. You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn’t, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn’t. Put it in perspective. Something like that. Or otherwise what was the point?

Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.

right now, more resources and money flow from the global South to the global North each year than the other way around. (…)
Right now, some $1 trillion is stolen out of global South countries each year and stashed in offshore secrecy jurisdictions, mostly by multinational companies seeking to evade taxes.

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.

They maneuvered around one another with the absolute confidence of people who had spent huge amounts of time together, who trusted and loved one another and who knew how to show one another off to best advantage and how to curb each other’s boring and annoying habits.

By shifting $10 trillion of excess annual income from the richest 1% to the global poor, we could end poverty in a stroke, and boost life expectancy in the global South to eighty years – eliminating the global health gap. And the richest 1% would still be left with an average annual household income of more than a quarter million dollars (…) And that’s just income; we haven’t even touched wealth

how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location.

she was quiet-voiced and even-tempered, having learned the uselessness of impatience in the work that must be done.

He was one of those superficially jolly people whose jolliness didn’t quite reach all the way up to his eyes.

(...)
And yet in return for this they receive literally pennies. The poorest 60% of humanity receives only about 5% of total global income.36 Over the course of the past four decades since 1980, their daily incomes have increased by an average of about 2 cents per year. (…) the vast majority of new income from global growth has gone to the world’s rich.

When people think of the global poor, they quite often imagine countries that are cut off from the world economy. (..) But this image gets it completely wrong. The poor are deeply integrated into the circuits of global capital. (…) They contribute the vast majority of the labour and resources that go into the global economy.
(...)

Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.

that's why we're called the Hand, or the women of the Hand, though we're not women only. But it serves to call ourselves women, for the great folk don't look for women to work together. Or to have thoughts about such things as rule or misrule. Or to have any powers.

He spoke very correctly, as if he wished he had an English accent but wasn’t quite pretentious enough to affect one.

una expresión weasel word (comadreja) es un término informal para palabras y frases destinadas a crear una impresión de que se ha dicho algo específico y significativo, cuando en realidad solo se ha comunicado una afirmación vaga o ambigua. También se puede definir con el término autoridad anónima. Los ejemplos incluyen las frases «algunas personas dicen», «la mayoría de la gente piensa» y «los investigadores creen».

«We can't do anything without each other,» he said. «But it's the greedy ones, the cruel ones who hold together and strengthen each other. And those who won't join them stand each alone.»

The key to being a good thief, Sam always felt, was utter brazenness.