Lessons in Magic and Disaster Quotes

“Some books stay with you even as you evolve, level up, and taste dissappointment, and maybe you owe something to those books.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“A person can’t really know who they are unless they know what they want. That’s a big part of why I do this thing: I can read the ransom notes left by my own heart.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“Everyone says nostalgia is about suffering, because of the Greek 'algos' meaning pain, but Jamie prefers to think of the algia in ‘nostalgia’ as coming from algae. The longing for lost people and places grows at the bottom of your soul, brackish and salty, clogging everything with its endless fronds. Nostalgic people can never want anything cleanly.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“Put simply, Sarah Fielding was obsessed with tyranny versus mutual aid. What makes people so eager to inflict misery on anyone less powerful than themselves, when they could achieve better outcomes by working together instead?”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“The rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century is inseparable from the rise of Calvinism and capitalism, which formed an unholy alliance to spread a gospel of industry and productivity (after chattel slavery and stolen land in the Americas made England rich and created a glut of resources). Calvinism focused on individual salvation, and a vision of “stewardship” in which every person needed to work hard to improve their situation on earth—which dovetailed nicely with capitalism’s new emphasis on relentless production.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“The truth was, people were garbage at any age—but school was an institution, no different in principle than prisons, the military, mental hospitals, or other places where society warehoused entire classes of people.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“Everyone deserves a place to live--including low-income people and the unhoused. Poverty shouldn't be a crime. I'm tired of watching people of color and queers be driven away from the places they helped to build. We need to change who we think of as a stakeholder.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“I wear my mistakes like my scars, proudly," Delia says. "They're credentials, because I learned better.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“But Jamie has always believed the truest joy in life is when someone else holds in their hands a relief map to all your most errant nonsense. Money is fake, fame is bullshit, but intimacy is bloody treasure.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“Capitalism wants to assign a value to each of us, based on our ability to generate profit for the owner class. They want to turn each of us into assets, pieces of capital, and decide whether we're worth investing in. But we don't have to live that way, none of us does. We can live for ourselves and the people we love.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster