Mike

“Blair thought, That’s how the empire will end, one-sided and rash, in a botched suicide, leaving India wrecked, Burma blinded.”
― Paul Theroux, Burma Sahib

“all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“History isn’t a narrative. There’s nothing tidy about it. There’s nothing clear about its margins. It’s an infiltrated, interlocking mess, and there are other systers whose brains are much more adapted to dealing with the fact that reality is not a story than humans are. Humans make a lot of terrible mistakes because we rely so heavily on narrative to understand the world. It allows our brains to be hacked by convincing fairy tales, to be hijacked by memes whether they have any objective reality or not. We probably needed rightminding more than most species just to remind us that stories are not the truth, even when they feel like the truth. Even when they suit all our biases and reinforce all our prejudices.”
― Elizabeth Bear, The Folded Sky

“was Miss Crane’s first experience of social snobbery abroad, which was never the same as snobbery at home because it was complicated by the demands, sometimes conflicting, of white solidarity and white supremacy.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown