Nick

“I wander cowboy sidewalks of wood, wearing a too-small hat, filled with remorse for the many lives I failed to lead.”
― George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

“We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever - the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.

But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow.”
― J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.”
― Jack Vance, Cugel the Clever

“Before capitalism will go to hell, then, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.”
― Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System