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
“The smile,” Leonardo interrupted him as he put one foot on the paintbox and, leaning forward, picked up a few brushes which he then let drop one by one, “the smile is not immortal, it’s merely unfinished, that’s all.” ~~ from 'Mona Lisa' by Alexander Lernet-Holenia, trans. Ignat Avsey
And only then did I understand
It is Jeoffry--and every creature like him--
Who can can teach us how to praise--purring
In their own language,
Wreathing themselves in the living fire.
~~ excerpt from the poem 'Wild Gratitude' by Edward Hirsch from 'The Gift of Animals'
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(Art credit: Mariusz Szmerdt)
"Ballet hadn’t become easy, but it made sense to me the way chess made sense to a great player. Mostly it was an awareness of what you could do with all the pieces. Then you could get creative, even playful. Sometimes it was a negotiation with ballet—what you gave it and what you asked in return." ~~ from 'City of Night Birds' by Juhea Kim
“Don’t get me wrong, I can’t do anything to change the way things are. That’s not why I went into politics, to make changes for the better for people like you. I went into politics to make sure things stay the same for people like me.” ~~ from 'Clown Town' by Mick Herron (spoken by Peter Judd, a very Boris Johnson-like character)
Julé Cunningham