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— Mahmoud Darwish

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“Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process…”

— Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age

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- Ollie Schminkey, My Father.

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“The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people’s gestures and movements.”

— Ken Liu, “Translator’s Postscript” to The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin

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“I typically arrive three years too late. I wish I had been able to sit in that white, aromatic kitchen and look you in the face but I was not ready. I was still on my way.”

— Mikko Harvey, from “Wind-Related Ripple in the Wheatfield,” Sixth Finch (Spring 2021)

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“You have to remember that I’ve been lonely for a long time. Loneliness is like ice. After you’ve been lonely long enough you don’t realize you’re cold, but you are … I don’t know, maybe at the center of me there’s some ice that never will melt, maybe it’s just been there too long. But you mustn’t worry. You didn’t put it there.”

— Larry McMurtry, from the novel The Last Picture Show (Dial Press, 1966)

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Nelly Sachs, tr. by Eric Plattner, from The Seeker: “Enigmas of Night,”

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“Configured this way, success is a lottery - just as survival today can look like a lottery, too. If you’re super lucky, if everyone likes you, if you’ve got hustle, you might end up making millions. Similarly, if you’re super lucky, if everyone likes you, if you can get that GoFundMe to go viral, you might end up being able to pay for your insulin, or your leg surgery after a bike accident, or your $10,000 hospital bill from giving birth. In any case, everything is so expensive that you might find yourself reading about the recent rash of suicides among New York taxi drivers as you take a slightly cheaper VC-subsidised ride from the company that has destroyed the taxi industry. You might find yourself routinely taking advantage of warehouse workers who have to pee in water bottles to get two-day shipping on a box of doggie poop bags you could’ve bought down the street. This is, in any case, mostly how things have worked out for me, even though my life is so easy, relatively speaking: I don’t have dependents, I don’t live with a disability - I never needed the reliability of Amazon to do what our current social contract won’t. Aside from this dead-end sense of my own ethical brokenness, what bothers me most about this situation is the idea that our cut-out-the-middleman era has somehow made everyone more equal - that a lack of technological barriers and a surplus of hustle have ushered in a fairer world. But venture capital partners are white men. Only 1 percent are black. In 2017, 4.4 percent of all VC deals went to companies founded by women, which was the highest percentage since 2006. Until now, only white men have been able to boldly stride forward the way Amazon and Uber did - on a business model of sidestepping regulations, cutting out protections, shoving off liability, and siphoning as much money as possible away from the people who physically do all the work. Whenever this changes, whenever women and minorities are allowed to be their own Bezos, it will hardly be a victory for anyone at all.”

— Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

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“Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning”

— W.S. Merwin, from “In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year,” The Lice (Copper Canyon Press, 2017; first published 1967)

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“We’ll never again be what we were. Each of us will have to decide if we’re better or worse. Inside, and occasionally outside as well, we were in a storm, a hurricane passed over us and the calm we’re enjoying now contains uprooted trees, collapsed roofs, torn-off TV antennae, and rubble, lots of rubble. Obviously, we have to rebuild ourselves: to plant new trees, but maybe we won’t have the same shoots in our nurseries, the same seeds. It’s fine for us to build new houses, but is it a good idea for the architect only to faithfully reproduce the previous plan? Wouldn’t it be infinitely better for him to rethink the problem and draw a new plan, one that takes into account our current needs? To clear the rubble, as far as possible; because there will also be rubble that nobody can clear from their hearts or memory.”

— Mario Benedetti, from Springtime in a Broken Mirror (Penguin Classics, 2018; first published 1982)

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“No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?”

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Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) Russian poet

(via macrolit)

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what a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for - and to do it so unconsciously

Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

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This day of mine was lost like all the other days, half of it thinking of yesterday, half of it thinking of tomorrow.

— Abbas Kiarostami, A Wolf Lying in Wait: Selected Poems, (tr. by Karim Emami & Michael Beard)     

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"Life is a lot more fragile than we think.

So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets.

Fairly, and if possible, sincerely."

- Haruki Murakami

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“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ”

― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

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Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous