Jonathan

“Violence had an enlivening effect. As long as someone else was the victim it made the blood pump, gave the world an edge of glamour.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“Do the consequences of a revolution justify in general the sacrifices it involves? The question is teleological and therefore fruitless. It would be as well to ask in face of the difficulties and griefs of personal existence: Is it worth while to be born? Melancholy reflections have not so far, however, prevented people form bearing or being born. Even in the present epoch of intolerable misfortune only a small percentage of the population of our planet resorts to suicide. But the people are seeking the way out of their unbearable difficulties in revolution.”
― Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

“Man had been given a brain that could think in numbers, and it could not be coincidence that the world was unlocked by that very tool. To understand any aspect of the cosmos was to look on the face of God: not directly, but by a species of triangulation, because to think mathematically was to feel the action of God in oneself.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“The self that had laughed and raised his glass and shouted out the words with the others seemed to him now to be foolishly, dangerously, disastrously innocent.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant