John

“The human personality is not an object, it's a process, a constant state of becoming, that depends on a web of interdependencies, binding us to one another with invisible filaments, to our time, to memories and possessions, and back to our changing selves. And even that image probably overstates the solidity and integrity of the human personality. Strip a person away from the relationships that constitute his identity—the friends, the loved ones, the familiar sounds—and the outcome is bound to be breakdown and madness.”
― Marcel Theroux

“I like to talk about America. It's so mysterious.”
― Robert Ashley, Quicksand

“Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure short of total abstention.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices

“A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it.”
― China Miéville, This Census-Taker