Julé Cunningham“You put the pain in a safe and locked chest where it can stay, no one can get to it. And then in the fullness of time, and when you’re ready, and if you’re brave enough to lift the lid and look inside, you might find jewels or raw lumber or any other building material for art.” - from 'Alchemy of a Blackbird' by Claire McMillan
'Do you believe that all the world was created for men, even the stars in the sky? Might it not be that all the world was made for all the world? Or men for the stars? Or the stars for the trees and the trees for the stones?' -- from 'We Are Green and Trembling' by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, trans. Robin Myers
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“Never has it occurred to you that there are people poised with erasers to erase you, people prepared to stab your flesh with their knives, people ready to trample you…Why? For the simple reason that you are a little more visible than they, taller by a centimeter. Most people cannot bear that. You have no children, you’re not an invalid, you aren’t sufficiently ugly, you aren’t married, you’re a woman, you’ve ventured out into the world, you ‘sing’, you’re accountable to no one—all this is an excess of freedom, something that is not so easily forgiven.” -- from 'Fox' by Dubravka Ugresic, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać, David Williams
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'To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live. But with our creaturely capacity for wonder comes a responsibility to it—the recognition what reality is not a singularity but a plane. Each time we presume to have seen the whole, the plane tilts ever so slightly to reveal new vistas of truth and new horizons of mystery, staggering us with the sudden sense that we had been looking at only a fragment, framed by our parochial point of view.' -- from 'The Universe in Verse' by Maria Popova
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Then all of a sudden, with a joy that I had not known within myself, I said: “If you want to spend the rest of your life listening and watching this nonsense, that’s up to you, but just now I’ve realized I want to spend my life doing something beautiful.” -- from 'The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen' by Shokoofeh Azar; (translator is anonymous for security reasons)
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"Time has a tendency to switch around. It’s as cunning as a fox, and it can be malicious. It can flow in one direction and simultaneously in the opposite one. We only think it’s always flowing along with us, and that our life sets its boundaries. Nothing could be further from the truth. It pulls us where it will. Backwards, to when we didn’t yet exist, and forwards to where we’ll no longer be there. It plays with us, fully aware that there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s not hard to play with human beings." -- from 'Needle's Eye' by Wiesław Myśliwski; trans. Bill Johnston
"The trick is to question every collar you’re handed, no matter how harmless it seems. Is it really just a harmless accessory, or is it a way to keep you in line." -- from 'Lessons from Cats for Surviving Fascism' by Stewart 'Brittlestar' Reynolds
"It is a May morning of luminous loveliness. The sunlight glows through a delicate muslin mist, the soft air is fragrant with the smell of lilac, and out over the tawny reaches of Sandymount strand, where Stephen Dedalus once trod upon seaspawn and seawrack while seeking myopically to make out the signatures of all the things he was sent there to read, the pale sky shines and shimmers like the inner skin of a vast soap bubble." -- from 'Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir' by John Banville
He found it deeply moving and a source of wonder that the same words could be read and understood in so many different ways. Or that one could comprehend the meaning of a sentence but not experience that meaning. That one could know what was written there, but not understand it. -- from 'The House of Day, House of Night' by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones
“It might be a painting where you study the artist’s pencil lines and paint, and the characters and their expressions. Paintings are like a book.” Consciously or not, he echoed one of the most famous sayings about the Louvre, by Cézanne, who once referred to the museum as “the book from which we learn to read.” -- from 'Adventures in the Louvre' by Elaine Sciolino