Ralph

“Ankit makes a drink that’s gonna make Randall absinthe with envy. It’s like a liquid portal between dimensions. You’ve gotta try it.’ ‘Always a pleasure to prepare the portal for you, sir.’ ‘You girls have got so much in common,’ I said, and thought to say more, but Blue Hijab and Karla looked at me in exactly the same not very flattering way, and I unthought it. ‘You marry them,’ Blue Hijab said, ‘hoping they’ll change, and grow. And they marry us, hoping that we won’t.’ ‘The connubial Catch 22,’ Karla said, taking Blue Hijab by the arm and leading her back to the Bedouin tent. ‘Come with me, you poor girl, and freshen up. You look very tired. How far have you come today?”
― Gregory David Roberts, The Mountain Shadow

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story – from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“Mubei: Zhongguo Liushi Niandai Da Jihuang Jishi [Tombstone: A Record of the Great Chinese Famine of the 60s], Cosmos Books, Hong Kong, 2008.”
― Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers