“But somehow it all went wrong instead. The onward march of progress has wandered off down a dark alley and been mugged. The Berlin Wall and Vietnam; the Rwandan Genocide, the Twin Towers, Camp Delta; suicide bombings and global warming. […]There was no progress. No stability. There was just the question of whether things happened far enough away.”
— Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
“The key to living during this environmental crisis is to STAY PUT. Focus on living and existing in your corner of the Earth, protect it. Travel and moving around all the time is so overrated. A lot of it is a waste of time. Create your own bliss where you are right now. Stop searching the world for it!”
I’ve only read a handful of history books (crime fiction is my passion) but they’ve all be great reads. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century; Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civ89l War Era; Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869; and Wires West: The Story of the Talking Wires. I’m currently reading STALINGRAD The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor.
(Wikipedia) “Stalingrad is a narrative history written by Antony Beevor of the battle fought in and around the city of Stalingrad during World War II, as well as the events leading up to it. The book starts with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the subsequent drive into the Soviet Union. Its main focus is the Battle of Stalingrad, in particular the period from the initial German attack to Operation Uranus and the Soviet victory.” Continue reading
“Few people can say: I am here. They look for themselves in the past and see themselves in the future.” — Georges Braque (1882–1963)
“The Democratic Party holds no statewide offices except lame-duck auditor Nicole Galloway. In rural Missouri, it is more respectable to be a meth cook than a Democrat. Huey Long himself would likely have to change parties to get elected in bright red Missouri.”
— St Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McCellan
“It crept into you like mist under an ill-fitting door, until words you didn’t know you knew had taken up residence–words like love, heartbreak, forever. People her age spent years having poetry hammered into them at school, and emerged without a couplet intact. But each and every one knew what followed “I’ll never dance with another.”
— The Last Voice You Hear (Mick Herron)
“He wondered now how many people there were […] living their back-up plan; who were office drones or office cleaners, teachers, plumbers, shop assistants, IT mavens, priests and accountants only because rock and roll, football, movies and authordom hadn’t panned out. And decided that the answer was everyone. Everyone wanted a life less ordinary. And only a tiny minority ever got it, and even they probably didn’t appreciate it much.”
— Slow Horses (Mick Herron)
“Pike was good at waiting, which was why he excelled in the Marines and other things. He could wait for days without moving and without being bored because he did not believe in time. Time was what filled your moments, so if your moments were empty, time had no meaning. Emptiness did not flow or pass; it simply was. Letting himself be empty was like
putting himself in neutral: Pike was.”
— The Last Detective (Robert Crais)
“It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities. It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave.”
— Distraction by Bruce Sterling (1998)