“Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy.
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Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“Only in homeopathy do you get specific remedies for people who believe they are made of glass, have a delusion that they are selling green vegetables, or have an aptitude for, or a horror of, mathematics.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“Someone who has the delusion Glass, is made of, does not literally believe herself to be made of glass but rather feels fragile and brittle, as if she might break. This might be someone who constantly thinks bad things are going to happen to her, or someone coming off drugs, perhaps, feeling she might break down.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
Scarlett Thomas
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
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“And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!” And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “No. This is what’s important.” —IAIN THOMAS”
― Arianna Huffington, quote from Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder
“Sagas wouldn't be interesting if terrible things didn't happen to the people in them.”
― Jack Campbell, quote from Valiant
“When Emma sat down on a rock to take off her shoes and stockings, he said to her, “You’ve Yankee feet. Long and skinny.”
“And you’ve Irish feet,” she said, right back at him. “Big and always in your mouth”
― Penelope Williamson, quote from The Passions of Emma
“They are like pythons in the jungle. The smallest child can crush a python egg. But let the snake hatch and grow and the python with squeeze and devour the child.”
― Richard Paul Evans, quote from Hunt for Jade Dragon
“Questions surround nearly every aspect of the assassination. The chain
of possession regarding each piece of evidence was tainted beyond repair.
The presidential limousine, which represented the literal crime scene,
was taken over by officials immediately after JFK’s body was carried into
Parkland Hospital and tampered with. The Secret Service apparently cleaned
up the limousine, washing away crucial evidence in the process. Obviously,
whatever bullet fragments or other material that was purportedly found
there became immediately suspect because of this. On November 26, the
windshield on the presidential limo was replaced.
The supposed murder weapon—a cheap, Italian Mannlicher-Carcano
rifle with a defective scope, allegedly ordered by Oswald through a post office
box registered to his purported alias, Alex Hidell—is similarly troublesome.
The two Dallas officers who discovered the rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, Seymour Weitzman and Eugene Boone,
both swore in separate affidavits that the weapon was a German Mauser. As
was to become all too common in this case, they would later each claim to be
“mistaken” in a curiously identical manner.
In fact, as late as midnight on November 22, Dallas District Attorney
Henry Wade would refer to the rifle as a Mauser when speaking to the press.
Local WFAA television reported the weapon found as both a German Mauser
and an Argentine Mauser. NBC, meanwhile, described the weapon as a British
Enfield. In an honest court, the Carcano would not even have been permitted
into the record, because no reliable chain of possession for it existed. Legally
speaking, the rifle found on the sixth floor was a German Mauser, and no one
claimed Oswald owned a weapon of that kind.”
― Donald Jeffries, quote from Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics
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