Quotes
The City of Miracles, Robert Jackson Bennett
We know little about the original Divinities, but we know even less of their children, who were often too unimportant to record, except perhaps for this one child, who was too important to put to paper.
"One should not seek ugliness in this world. There is no lack of it. You will find it soon enough, or it will find you."
"What puzzles the dead are," says Taty. She looks away into the wilderness. "They take so much of themselves with them, you're not even sure who you're mourning."
The will to change, bell hooks
If [men] dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real "men"
The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love.
There is one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger. Real men get mad. And their mad-ness, no matter how violent or violating, is deemed natural — a positive expression of patriarchal masculinity.
In a loving relationship, abuse is unacceptable. You should not have to tolerate any abuse to be loved.
Ultimately the men who will choose against violence, against death, do so because they want to live fully and well, because they want to know love. These are men who are true heroes, the men whose lives we need to know about, honour, and remember.
Death and the Dervish, Meša Selimović
I look at these long rows of words, the tombstones of my thoughts, and I do not know whether I have killed them, or given them life.
The river resembles me: sometimes turbulent and foaming, more often calm and inaudible. I was sorry when the dammed it up below the tekke and diverted it inro a trench to make it obedient and useful, so it would run through a mill wheel. And I was happy when it swelled, destroyed the dam, and flowed free. I knew all the while that only tamed waters can mill wheat.
Her story was of no interest to me. for I knew the end as soon as I heard the beginning, and I was not moved at all by her compliment since it was insincere.
But this young man was not a suitable interlocutor. People in fact talk most often for their own sake, and with a need to hear the echo of their words.
We wanted the same thing from one another, each placing his faith in the strength of the other, both of us powerless, and that was the saddest part of this pointless encounter.
"Calm down."
"Why?"
"You've got a strange look on your face."
"Is it sad?"
"I wish it were sad."
"A few moments ago, in the graveyard, I waited in vain for something to give me a sign when I came to Harun's grave."
"You ask too much of yourself. It's enough that you grieve."
He believed that there were not only victories and defeats in life, that there was also breathing, and watching, and listening, and words, and love, and friendship, and ordinary life, which depends greatly on us and no one else.
It was as if that name bathed me in light. The time I had spent without him had worn me out. That day, then, at once—I needed him more than ever.
"It would be better if you never needed anyone's protection."
"He's right. It would be better if I don't ever need anyone protection. I should be my own shield. It's not right for me to burden a friend with troubles that I create myself. If you can't swim, you shouldn't jump in the water hoping someone will pull you out."
"But that someone wouldn't be a friend of they didn't do it. You understand friendship as freedom; I understand it as obligation. My friend is the same as I. If I protect them, I protect myself."
Metro 2033, by Dmitry Glukhovsky
See, Artyom, you obviously come from a station where the clock works and you all look at it in awe, comparing the time on your wrist watch to the red numbers above the tunnel entrance. For you, time is the same for everyone, just like light. Well, here it's the opposite: nothing is anyone else's business. No one is obliged to make sure there's light for all the people who have made their way here. Go up to anybody here and suggest just that and it will seem absurd to them. Whoever needs light has to bring it here with them. It's the same with time: whoever needs to know the time, whoever is afraid of chaos, needs to bring their own time with them. Everyone keeps some time here. Their own time. And it's different for everybody and it depends on their calculations, but they're all equally right, and each person believes in their own time, and subordinates their life to its rhythms. For me it's evening right now, for you it's morning - and what? People like you are so careful about storing up the hours you spend wandering, just as ancient peoples kept pieces of glowing coal in smouldering crucibles, hoping to resurrect fire from them. But there are others who lost their piece of coal, maybe even threw it away. You know, in the metro, it is basically always night-time and it makes no sense to keep track of time here so painstakingly. Explode your hours and you'll see how time will transform - it's very interesting. It changes - you won't even recognize it. It will cease to be fragmented, broken into the sections of hours, minutes and seconds. Time is like mercury: scatter it and it will grow together again, it will again find its own integrity and indeterminacy. People tamed it, shackled it into pocket-watches and stop-watches - and for those that hold time on a chain, time flows evenly. But try to free it and you will see: it flows differently for different people, for some it is slow and viscous, counted in the inhalations and exhalations of smoked cigarettes, for others it races along, and they can only measure it in past lives. You think it's morning now? There is a great likelihood that you are right: there's a roughly twenty five percent likelihood. Nevertheless, this morning of yours has no sense to it, since it's up there on the surface and there's no life up there anymore. Well, there're no more people, anyway. Does what occurs above have value for those who never go there? No. So when I say “good evening” to you, if you like, you can answer “good morning.” There's no time in this station, except perhaps one and it's very strange: now it is the four hundred and nineteenth day and I'm counting backwards.
The Wanderer's Hávamál, Translated by Jackson Crawford
He needs water, the one who has just arrived, dry clothes, and a warm welcome from a friendly host — and if he can get it, a chance to listen and be listen to.
Earthsea - The Four Books, by Ursula Le Guin
Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are
If you don't speak, what can I do but leave you?
It’s none of their business, where you are, or who you are, or what you choose to do or not to do! If they come prying they can leave curious.
- She obeys me, but only because she wants to.
- It’s the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
- She's my best friend, Sam said.
- Sure, Max said, I get that. But is it, you know—I hope this isn't weird that I'm asking this—is it romantic? Or has it ever been romantic?
- No, Sam said. We've never... It's more than romantic. It's better than romance. It's friendship.
It was never worth worrying about someone you didn't love. And it wasn't love if you didn't worry.
Sam's doctor said to him, "The good news is that the pain is in your head." But I am in my head, Sam thought.
Sam knew the foot was gone. He could see it was gone. He knew that what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is very bit as closed a system as a Mac.
A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds.
The Ambassadors, by Henry James
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. [...] Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t quite know which. Of course at present I’m a case of reaction against the mistake; and the voice of reaction should, no doubt, always be taken with an allowance. But that doesn’t affect the point that the right time is now yours. The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. You’ve plenty; that’s the great thing; you’re, as I say, damn you, so happily and hatefully young. Don’t at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Of course I don’t take you for a fool, or I shouldn’t be addressing you thus awfully. Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!
Mon Grand, Ugo R.
On ne peut pas être sûr si la question n'a pas été posée, Et si on la pose
C'est bien qu'on est loin d'être sûr
C'est certain
Mais cette fois c'était sûr. J'étais quelqu'un. Enfin depuis le
premier jour on est quelqu'un. Enfin, depuis le premier
jour on nait quelqu'un. C'est qu'après, faut encore
le devenir
Apocryphe de la vierge brebis, Ugo R.
Je voulais
Je voulais vous dire
Je voulais vous dire Messie
Que je ne vous suivrai pas.
(Puis la brebis partie Jeune et trottant
Elle aussi
Pour son printemps.)
Monkey King, Wu Cheng'en
"But where to hide the evidence?" Monkey wondered. "Judging by the terrible smell, I suspect behind that for over there is a Bureau of Rice Reincarnation. Stash the real statues in there, would you?"
A little life, Hanya Yanagihara
Who could know if Felix would ever have friends? Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged.
None of them really wanted to listen to someone else's story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.
"You looked really, really nice. You're a great looking kid; I hope someone's told you that before." And then, before he could protest, "acceptance, Jude".
"If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully."
"You won't understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are — not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving — and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad — or good — it might me, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best as well."
How high we go in the dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
He imagines people on the street looking up from their phones and into each other's eyes — Hello, how are you? Why are you so sad? How can we do better?