Violence is a weak person’s idea of what power is. | Iyad el-Baghdadi, Restoring the Past Won’t Liberate Palestine

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. | Warren Buffett

Half of what makes our bygone happy days happy is what we remember of them. The other half is what we forget.

| James Poniewozik, ‘Happy Days’ Got Us Unstuck in Time

Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

| Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

The suspended anxiety of this year is not entirely unfamiliar to me. I have fallen through the cracks of life before. I’ve come to think of these times of life as wintering, a season outside the usual ebb and flow, when the comforting bustle of everyday society falls out of reach. Most of us have been to this place. We arrive there in the wake of illness, depression or bereavement; that darkness may yawn open during major life events like divorce or job loss. However we come to it, wintering is usually involuntarily, lonely and bitterly painful.

This year has brought us into close contact with loss. Many winters have come all at once. But within these winters, there is the seed of something necessary. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. As we grow older, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. Each time we endure the cycle, we learn from the previous round, and we do a few things better. This is how wisdom is made.

| Katherine May, Wasn’t It Winter Just Yesterday?