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February 4 - February 12, 2021
I did not watch the news. I avoided the news like other people avoided cholesterol. But that’s not something you admit. Ignorance is not a virtue.
Turkey was a place where you didn’t have to go looking for politics—it found you.
Distance, time, hardship—it all existed on a different scale here.
Djarbah has a majestic way of speaking. His words stroll out like well-dressed senior citizens on an afternoon walk.
We just love to make it hard for ourselves. We are, in many ways, quite ridiculous.
As advertising for a product went, this was like being sold contact lenses by a blind man.
How do you explain a country? It’s impossible. Rrridiculous, even. It would be nothing more than a lie.”
Narcissism is the writer’s superpower.
Yes, it is perfectly okay to measure time in wines. I’m pretty sure that’s what the Greeks did.
Every prayer is like a small call up to God, but when we band together it amplifies that sound.”
Hugs, not drugs.
I guess it’s well and good unleashing your mind, but you have to be careful it doesn’t wander off.
The mind is a fragile thing; life is its blunt-force trauma.
I was struck by how prone to overcompensation humans are. The more tenuous our right to power, the more stupendous the title we give ourselves to try to obfuscate that. The less safe we feel in our throne, the more bombastic the crown we cast upon our head.
One of atheism’s strongest selling points is that there’s nothing to remember. It’s a real boon for the absent-minded.
The first ape’s climbing down from the trees was a dick move that condemned hundreds of thousands of other animals to extinction at our hands. Their sacred rights have counted for very little, thus far.
Perhaps uncertainty is a good trait, in line with the complexity of the world in which we live.
It seemed like even this religion had too much for me to remember.
The English curse. You use jokes as a shield to not feel things. You know that, right?”
I think you’re afraid to really try because as long as you never do, you can’t fail.
You confuse freedom with having no responsibilities. But that’s not freedom. That’s just selfishness.”
Chernobyl. These were the money shots. The reason people came here. For the name, story, myth, and legend. Not the less-photogenic reality.
Nuclear really is the nuclear option. There’s no going back, no undo; its scars are permanent.
Chernobyl is not that rewarding. All the things you want to see, you can’t, because they’re too dangerous. Yet that danger doesn’t feel real, because it’s just a number on the screen of a Geiger counter.
The wrong group gets too certain about themselves, their beliefs, and their rights. They pull society’s levers and inflict the repercussions upon everyone else.
History is what happens when ego meets happenstance.
“Hitler was also democratically elected. There is no virtue in democracy.”
I’d heard the word freedom so many times that day, and this was a very visual reminder that one person’s freedom can directly inhibit someone else’s.
“Borders remind us that we’re all slaves,”
countries really are collective fictions.
That is what travel is for. Being where you don’t belong frees you from any expectations about how things there are supposed to work, and, in turn, how you will react to them.
Daily life is kind of boring,
It’s not to be recommended, really, any of it. Unlike running away… Running away is great. It lets you escape from the prison of routine.
Here, it became clear to me for the first time that there might be losers in the European experiment. Already so many of the young people here had left.
I’d spent enough time in the company of this group and alcohol to know how poorly they mixed. They were like a quadruple gin and stupid
Not everything in Thetford is explainable, but absolutely everything is flammable.
the only way you know that something has value is if you find yourself willing to make sacrifices for it.
An obligation-less life is a selfish life.
