Scott

“Read a verse of Homer and you can walk the walls of Troy alongside Hector; fall into a paragraph by Fitzgerald and your Now entangles with Gatsby’s Now; open a 1953 book by Ray Bradbury and go hunting T. rexes. Ursula Le Guin said: “Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time,” and she’s right, of course. The shelves of every library in the world brim with time machines. Step into one, and off you go.”
― Anthony Doerr, author of “All the Light We Cannot See”

“I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”
― Maurice Sendak

“I eventually got a handle on the drinking. It happens as you get older. It happens, or you don’t get older. Drink hard in your twenties and you’re a regular, fun guy. Keep drinking hard through your thirties and you start to separate yourself from fun, health and indeed other people. If you’re still doing it in your forties it’s probably because you have unresolved stresses and problems which you are clumsily and destructively self-medicating. Drinking hard into your fifties means that you’re blowing hot and cold on ever seeing your sixties. I woke up a week after my fiftieth birthday unable to remember the previous three days, and decided to stop. I could say ‘simple as that’, except that it really wasn’t simple at all. There was a clincher, though, and it was this: my main rationale for drinking was to calm myself in the face of my night terrors. But although I drank a lot, the nightmares refused to go away. I tried a few weeks of facing them without the alcohol, and though the terrors were no better they were certainly not worse. So I quit drinking.”
― Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself

“What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes—mass production, mass culture, mass politics—that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and possible colonial conquest.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928