Nayana

“Perhaps the real revelation is simply that life has caught up with you. All this time, when you thought you were fooling everyone, that was only because no one was paying attention. But eventually the world does pay attention, and suddenly it is you who are on trial, not the world but you. The trial you'd managed to put off for years is finally underway and you see, now, that you are not the plaintiff, as you'd always assumed, but the defendant, not the accuser but the accused.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“She never thought of herself as living in a city full of children, but maybe every city and every neighborhood is full of children when you’ve lost your own.”
― Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

“There was the pessimism of the revolutionaries, as Keynes called it, the worry of those who thought the world so doomed that the only hope was to turn everything upside down. Then there was the pessimism of the reactionaries, those who thought the world so doomed that any sort of change at all would send civilization reeling into the abyss.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Now most people in affluent and middle-income countries worry about what (and how much) is best to eat in order to maintain or improve their health and extend their longevity, not whether they will have enough to survive.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future