Joshua Claytor

“...love musn't be a means, it must be an end.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit”
― Edward Said

“Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“For some of the things that plagued the seventeenth-century New Englander we have modern-day explanations. For others we do not. We have believed in any number of things—the tooth fairy, cold fusion, the benefits of smoking, the free lunch—that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion. We have all believed that someone had nothing better to do than spend his day plotting against us. The seventeenth-century world appeared full of inexplicables, not unlike the automated, mind-reading, algorithmically enhanced modern one.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692