Happy new year everybody.

Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?

– Joseph Stalin

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

– Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

An answer for the rich. Start crying, weep for the miseries that are coming to you. Your wealth is all rotting, your clothes are all eaten up by moths. All your gold and your silver are corroding away, and the same corrosion will be your own sentence, and eat into your body, it was a burning fire that you stored up as your treasure for the last days. Labourers mowed your fields , and you cheated them – listen to the wages that you kept back, calling out, realise that the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. On earth you have had a life of comfort and luxury, in the time of slaughter you went on eating to your heart’s content. It was you who condemned the innocent and killed them, they offered you no resistance.

– The letter of St James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ

And of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. probably plenty of them

– On Writing, Stephen King

Scientists have calculated that we can burn about 500 more gigatons of fossil carbon … before really dangerous effects will follow for most of Earth’s bioregions, meaning also food production. … in the meantime, some people will be trying to sell and burn the portion of [located carbon stocks] they own or control while they still can … to make a trillion or two – not the crucial portion … that pushes us over the edge, just one little last taking. … Executive decisions for [the nineteen largest organizations doing this] will be made by about five hundred people. They will be good people. Patriotic politicians… conscientious corporate executives… family men … well educated and well meaning. Pillars of the community. Givers to charity. … They will want the best for their children.

– The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson

My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you’re never around assholes. That’s the two things to really fight for in life.

– John Waters

I asked her what kind of books she wrote, and she replied horror stories. That pleased me … Anyone who’s capable of writing things like that must be a courageous Person.

– Drive your plow over the bones of the dead, Olga Tokarczuk

Do not be afraid

– Jesus to the women, Matthew 28:10

You still have time. Not a lot, but if you hurry you may just be able to …

– Me