Words&Dirt

“I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.”

––We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson, pg. 9

“In his book Of Paradise and Power, the historian Robert Kagan argues that Western Europeans live in paradise but shouldn’t seek to operate by the rules of paradise once they move out into the world of power. Perhaps, as the euro crisis diminishes and we look around at paradise, it seems inconceivable that we could go backward; but history tells us how much things can change in just a few decades, and geography tells us that if humans do not constantly strive to overcome its ‘rules,’ its ‘rules’ will overcome us.”

––Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World, by Tim Marshall, pg. 107-8