Barbara

“He’d known for a long time by then that the world’s changes wouldn’t be reversed, but still, the realization cast his memories in a sharper light. The last time I ate an ice-cream cone in a park in the sunlight. The last time I danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane that hadn’t been repurposed as living quarters, an airplane that actually took off. The last time I ate an orange.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“At the very least,” she’d written to me once, “when we die we will be as if asleep, in the same place we were before birth, so why fear death? Scattered on the wind, unaware as we were before we came into this world, with no memory of any of it.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“When Flora got married, she was fourteen. Now she has three kids and the village wells are dry and the nearest reliable water source is a two-hour walk from her home. Here in the Funhalouro District adolescent moms like Flora spend about six hours a day searching for and transporting water. Yesterday she walked three hours to harvest water lilies from a lake so her kids would have something to eat. And what do our most enlightened leaders suggest we do? Switch to e-billing. Buy three LED bulbs and get a free tote bag. Earth has eight billion people to feed and the extinction rate is a thousand times higher than it was at pre-human levels. This is not something we fix with tote bags.

Excerpt from: "Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel" by Anthony Doerr. Scribd.
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― Doerr Anthony

“Back at his apartment after ten hours in the computer lab, Adam turns on the TV. Oil wars and sectarian violence. It’s way too early to think about sleeping, though that’s all he wants to do. He’s still a score of stories up in the air, held aloft by a nonexistent tree, listening to the creak of that high house and the calls of birds he’d like to be able to name. He tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory