For a while, when I was not yet ten, living in a mid twentieth-century suburb in the clean, quiet, white government town of Ottawa, I collected stamps. The bug lasted maybe a year, until we moved, Mum, Dad, younger brother, to Liverpool, England. The collection, including stamps from countries that were no more, dissolved into the past.
I didn't collect anything again until I went to University. By then I'd been reading pretty well non-stop since Mum taught me to read at the age of four. The more I read, the more some file in my mind filled with book lines of particular pertinence, lines that seemed to nail and solidify my own half-formed intuitions as to what the heck my fellow humans were up to, their natures in action. Quotes. "The need to inquire has been replaced by the need to acquire." "The duty of governments is to administer compassion and govern greed. So, none of them have succeeded in doing it the other way around." "Within Canada, two types of people are operating against each other; those that would make the world a better place, and those who would make their world a better place." |
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