The shoddiness of their work, their love of spectacle, their constant speechifying, their disproportionate reaction to all setbacks, their dishonesty, their prejudices, their disdain for expertise, their willingness to trust quacks, their scapegoating of the less powerful, their embrace of performative gestures at the expense of substance, their misogyny, their ill-concealed social awkwardness funneled into needless displays of aggression—yes, this is all very much in character. The good news is that it is easy to diagnose this disease. The bad news is that if we don’t get it cleared up, our nation’s 250-year history will culminate in the same sort of recriminatory meltdown as an internet comment thread that spirals from “What did you do today?” to full Nazism with stunning speed.

— Hamilton Nolan

In fact, I am now beginning to understand where I do stand, Alistair - I stand with the world, in its goodness and beauty. In these hysterical, monochromatic, embattled times, I call to its soul, the way musicians can, to its grieving and broken nature, to its misplaced meaning, to its fragile and flickering spirit. I sing to it, praise it, encourage it, and strive to improve it - in adoration, reconciliation, and leaping faith.

— Nick Cave

Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.

— W. Danny Hillis

Ultimately, it is an act of signalling: I think, therefore I mope. At some point, being smart and being worried about the world became conterminous. Pessimism is now a shortcut to intellectual respectability, like using orchestral strings in a pop song or filming in black and white.

— The audacity of mope, Janan Ganesh

Age is just a number, so they say, but numbers are pretty important. This one gives you a rough idea of where you are on the journey between birth and death. You might want to make a note of it is all I’m saying.

— 27 Notes On Growing Old(er), Ian Leslie

These days, I am neither distrustful nor suspicious of the world, even though my heart breaks for it, and I am not despairing, depressed or embittered. Indeed, I see heartbreak as the most proportional response to the state of the world – to say I love you is to say my heart breaks for you, and this sentiment resonates within all things, bringing a clarity to both the world before us and the world beyond the veil. Sorrow becomes a way of life, part laughter, part tears, with very little space between. It is a way of conducting oneself in the world, of loving it, of worshipping it.

— Nick Cave

This world must be aired, its stiffness must be eased.
(…)
There are knots to untie, abscesses to drain.
(…)
For ten thousand years in this part of the world we’ve always been tribal, tribal, tribal. But Gilgamesh left alone, all ties forever broken, searching for life and death. Since that distant day we haven’t invented a single man who didn’t found a religion. We haven’t had a single man who was effectively alone, who sought on his own account, to understand good and evil, who could stand up crucified without anyone knowing it, and carry his adventure and his secret to a grave that didn’t open on either Heaven or Hell. Shepherd or sheep you always have defined yourselves in terms of herds.

— Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose

Tajar grumbled and shook his head and went shuffling off in his awkward gait. Nobody’s just finished, he thought. It doesn’t happen like that to a people. Doesn’t our own history prove it doesn’t? You can’t just humiliate a people and expect good to come from it. Anyway, nations don’t learn lessons the way a child does, history isn’t as simple as that. People learn to hide and survive or hate and survive or dream and survive, but the one thing they do is survive and not with acceptance in their hearts for those who humiliate them. A million more Arabs under Israeli rule? It’s impossible. It can’t be, it won’t work.

— Edward Whittemore, Jericho Mosaic

Ghosting isn’t always cruelty; sometimes it’s collapse. But let’s be honest: silence isn’t clarity. It’s avoidance dressed up as boundary-setting. It doesn’t spare someone’s feelings, it just leaves them with unanswered questions and a story they have to finish alone.

— Miski Omar, I’m not ignore your message

Destiny, he murmured, my destiny. What a droll thing life is. This mysterious and merciless arrangement of logic for a futile purpose.

— Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

It’s never your job to spare someone the experience of disappointment, provided that the action that triggers it is, in other ways, the right one to take.

— Oliver Burkeman

Great fiction is hard to sell. What happens to a person who reads a book— if it’s any good— is a profoundly private and irrational process, and the more distinctive the novel, the more private and irrational the process. That’s where the trouble with publishing begins.

— Judy Karasik, Afterword to Sinai Tapestry