- Broken Glass, Alain Mabanckou
- ... this jumble of words is life, come on, come into my lair, check out the rotting garbage, here's my take on life, your fiction's no more than the output of a load of old has-beens designed to comfort other old has-beens, and until the day your characters start to see how the rest of earn our nightly crust, there'll be no such thing as literature ...
- The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer
- We humans, William James would write decades later, are akin to dogs in a library: We're surrounded by extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, but entirely in a form we can not decipher. All we can do is to give ourselves over to what we can not know. As Dickinson says; Wonder is not precisely knowing and not precisely knowing not.
- Years by Annie Lenaux
- "Silence was the background of things and the bicycle measured the speed of life.”
- late 80s "The profusion of things concealed the scarcity of ideas and the erosion of beliefs"
- in 2000s "... The discourse of pleasure reigned supreme. You had to feel pleasure while reading, writing, taking a bath, defecating. It was the alpha and the Omega of human activities.
- The ideals of May 68 were being transformed into objects and entertainment
- We were inundated with explanations of self, tirelessly supplied by....
- The word 'struggle' was discredited as a throwback to Marxism, become an object of ridicule. As for "defending rights", the first that came to mind were those of the consumer.
- Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
- I realized that war was monstrous. If it didn’t kill those it touched, it took away a piece of their souls, so they could never be whole again.
- If I had a wish, I would want nothing fancy, just a normal day when all of us could be together as a family; a day where we could just cook, eat, talk, and laugh. I wondered how many people around the world were having such a normal day and didn’t know how special and sacred it was.
- Being a mother is never easy, it is about failing, learning and then failing again.
- “Try to forgive and forget, Ngọc,” said Grandma. “If you bear grudges, you’re the one who’ll have to bear the burden of sorrow.”
- Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday
- ... Saul Bellow who said that death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything; what, then, does one make of so much darkness already showing through?
- This is because my mind is always turning over this question of how I’m going to feel later, based on what I’m doing now. Later in the day. Later in the week. Later in a life starting to look like a series of activities designed to make me feel good later, but not now. Knowing I’ll feel good later makes me feel good enough now.
- The older you get,” he explained, “the more you have to do before you can go to bed. I’m up to a hundred things.
- The storied life of A.J. Fikri, Gabirelle Ziven
- You need everything you need to know about a person with the answer to the question: "what is your favorite book?"
- The most annoying thing about it (life?) is that once a person start giving a shit about one thing, then he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything."
- In the future, he will rethink his unlocked door policy. It had only occurred to him that someone might steal something, not that someone might leave something
- we are not quite novels, we are not short stories, at the end we are collected works
- I'm afraid of men, Vivek Shraya
- My labour only amplified their own laziness, and each of the men edndeavoured to recalibrate me back to the couch.
- …. Another problem with the ideas of the “good man” - the bar is ultimately a low one, and men are heralded every day for engaging in basic acts of domestic labour like washing dishes. “typical” is dangerously interchangeable with “acceptable.” “Boys will be boys,” after all.
- Or maybe I’m mourning a life that I still don’t get to fully live because it’s one I continue to have to defend and authenticate.
- But your fear is not only hurting me, it’s hurting you, limiting you from being everything you could be. Consider how often you have dismissed your own appearance, behaviors, emotions, and aspirations for being too feminine or masculine. What might your life be if you didn’t impose those designations on yourself, let alone on me?
- What if you were to challenge yourself every time you feel afraid of me – and all of us who are pushing against gendered expectations and restrictions? What if you cherished us as archetypes of realized potential? What if you were to surrender to sublime possibility – yours and mine? Might you then free me at last of my fear, and of your own?
- Sapians,
- Greenwood, Michael Christie
- There is nothing like poverty to teach you just how much of a luxury integrity truly is.
- Why is it that people are engineered to live just long enough to pile up a lifetime of mistakes, but not long enough to fix them? If only we were like trees, she thinks, as she pilots her Westfalia through the iron gates of her father's mansion for the last time, with Liam strapped into the passenger seat beside her. If only we had centuries, Maybe then there'd be time enough for us to mend all the harm we had done.
- Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates- in the body, in the world - like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure. It is impossible to ungrow what has already grown, to undo what is already done. Still, people trust the things he's built. And there is something to that. It's not enough. But it's what he'll take with him.
- "People can save you, Liam", she says with startling clarity. "Always remember that. They do it all the time. Except it's usually in ways we'll never understand. But that doesn't change what they did"
- Bird by bird, by Anne Lamott
- You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.
- Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.
- ....feel despair and worry settle on my chest like an x-ray apron
- It is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don’t think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivably complex.
- “If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”
- You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp
- The Return, Fathers, Sons, and the land in between, by Hisham Matar
- On living in exile: "how to live away from places and people I love. Joseph Brodsky was right. So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured."
- The Ensemble, by Aja Gabel
- Even the absence of love was a love story for her.