Tom

“and here is where unsentimental history and statistical literacy can change our view of modernity, for they show that nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they're only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Ah, yes, hindsight, always my weapon of choice.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, And Put Away Childish Things