Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

Reality, I think, is mostly imagination, poorly disguised.

But never underestimate the American bourgeoisie’s capacity to embrace fascism under the name of populism. Or the power of television. Without TV, Kennedy would never have beaten Nixon.

No one called Marty Walsh “Farty” but me, the only reason being that anyone who talked out of his ass as much as he did deserved a name to match.

My baba says the only society worth living in is one where everyone has access to food, shelter, clean water, and health services.

A very hyped short story for a detailed and heavy topic.

It’s important, Ellie, that they feel we’re a very benevolent dictatorship. It means we can get away with more.

You made a haunted house out of your own flesh and bones.

When you’re an only child, semi-imprisoned, books become more than paper between hard cardboard, more than the alphabet organized into words and printed on a page.

Who cared that life was lonely, that jobs were thankless drudgery, that the romance of the proud American state was myth, that the rules of life were laid carefully in neat books and laws written by stern Europeans who stalked the town and state like the grim reaper, with their righteous churches spouting that Jews murdered their precious Jesus Christ?

I did not know when humans pray for nature, they pray for something to control.

Women can be heroes, too.

The world he thought he knew had become an odd thing, twisting time and purpose. But it had remained an unfair universe in the end.

Men were always so afraid of tears, of having a hysterical woman on their hands.

If you expected the present to be a continuation of the past, you weren't actually looking at the present through clear eyes.

Depraved, disturbing, deranged, & delightful.

We have been given immense power, and we must use it. To squander it would be wicked especially if we do not use it to right wrongs

“They came for Manchuria first. They will come for Shanghai next, swallow up the coastal city where they have already been allowed land and law. The empire across the sea is small. And when this is an age of expansion, they will claim that invasion must be performed in self-defense, that it is a necessity while their people grow hungrier, a population with mouths to feed and feet to plant.”

“That’s ridiculous—I would never kick him onto the sofa,” Juliette replied. “If he ever angers me, a better punishment would be for him to continue sleeping next to me, feeling the power of my wrath.”

If you shrink yourself to the smallness of your circumstances, you’ll soon disappear.