Kate

“There are many people who like me, and many people who don’t. For most of my life, I figured that one group was wrong, but I could never be certain which one. Either I was likable, and some people just didn’t know me well enough to see it, or I was unlikable, and some people were just patient with me.”
― Annie Kotowicz, What I Mean When I Say I'm Autistic: Unpuzzling a Life on the Autism Spectrum

“The only way to do better, to have better, is to lose pieces of what was. It's inevitable that you can't bring everything with you, like carrying water in your cupped hands from one river to another. There are too many cracks, and if you're so eager to move, you'll just have to get used to new water.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“It all fit. The love of power, the focus on Russia to the exclusion of the rest of the world—with an exception made perhaps only for a Napoleon or a Hitler, whose power trumped even their enemy status but who were made relevant by the fact that they had invaded Russia—this and other survey results added up to a totalitarian mind-set. The only consideration that gave Gudkov pause was what seemed like an utter lack of a concept of the future. He had been taught that totalitarianism presupposed the image of a glorious future. But as he researched both Communist and Nazi ideologies, he came to the conclusion that the appeal of the rhetoric in both cases lay in archaic, primitive images: a simple society, a world of “us,” a tribe. Fromm, in fact, rejected the very idea of an image of the future in Nazi ideology and stressed the “worship of the past.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“A constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia