Tamara

“The musicals were “pastries designed to placate the impoverished with daydreams of unattainable bliss.” The horror movies were “sleights of hand in which the fears of the workingman have been displaced by those of pretty girls.” The vaudevillian comedies were “preposterous narcotics.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow. We save those we can.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People