“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.”

― Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 📚 💬

“How sad the evening earth! How mysterious the mists over the swamps! He who has wandered in these mists, he who has suffered much before death, he who has flown over this earth bearing on himself too heavy a burden, knows it. The weary man knows it. And without regret he leaves the mists of the earth, its swamps and rivers, with a light heart he gives himself into the hands of death, knowing that she alone can bring him peace.”

From Mikhail Bulgakov. “THE MASTER AND MARGARITA” 📚 💬

Landsman, of course, is sorry, too. He has already apologized to her several times, alone and in the presence of others, orally and in writing, formally in measured phrases and in untrammeled spasms: Sorry I’m sorry I’m so, so sorry. He has apologized for his craziness, his erratic behavior, his glooms and jags, for the years of round-robin exaltation and despair. He has apologized for leaving her, and for begging her to take him back again, and for breaking down the door to their old apartment when she declined to do so. He has abased himself, and rent his garments, and groveled at her shoes. Most of the time Bina has, good and caring woman that she is, offered Landsman the words he wanted to hear. He has prayed to her for rain, and she has sent cool showers. But what he really requires is a flood to wash his wickedness from the face of the earth. That or the blessing of a yid who will never bless anyone again.

• excerpt from Michael Chabon. “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”. 📚 💬

But this is a new chapter. The city is going back in time, readying itself to start again with its simple piracy in the rich shores near my home. Everything has changed, and I find myself trembling, excited, biding my time, eager to finish this letter.

It does not embarrass me. I am opened up by it.

This is a Possible Letter. Until the last second, when I write your name beside that word “Dear,” all those sheets and months ago, this is a Possible Letter, pregnant with potentiality. I am very powerful right now. I am all ready to mine the possibilities, make one of them fact.

I have not been the best friend to you, and I need you to forgive me that. I think back to my friends in New Crobuzon, and I wonder which of them you are to be.

And if I want this letter to be a remembrance, to be something with which to say goodbye instead of hello again, then you will be Carrianne. You are my dear friend, if that is so, and the fact that I did not know you when I started to write you this letter means nothing. This is a Possible Letter, after all.

Whoever you are, I have not been the best friend to you, and I am sorry.

• excerpt from China Mieville. “The Scar”. 📚 💬

I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation. Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we’ve led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable. Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you.

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

exceprt from Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. 📚 💬

“Where did I come from?” you asked. “Where’s my father?”

“You don’t have one,” I said. “I made you myself.”

“Everyone has a father.”

“Not everyone.”

“Why did you make me?” you said.

“I made you so that I could love you,” I said.

• from “Cloudberry Jam” by Karin Tidbeck (from the short story collection Jagannath) 📚 💬

No doubt about it: there were two moons.

One was the moon that had always been there, and the other was a far smaller, greenish moon, somewhat lopsided in shape, and much less bright. It looked like a poor, ugly, distantly related child that had been foisted on the family by unfortunate events and was welcomed by no one. But it was undeniably there, neither a phantom nor an optical illusion, hanging in space like other heavenly bodies, a solid mass with a clear-cut outline. Not a plane, not a blimp, not an artificial satellite, not a papier-mache moon that someone made for fun. It was without a doubt a chunk of rock, having quietly, stubbornly settled on a position in the night sky, like a punctuation mark placed only after long deliberation or a mole bestowed by destiny.

• from 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. 📚 💬

I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel, world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.

― Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 📚 💬

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven, six, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer — not-nine, not-eight, not-seven, not-six, not-five, etc. — is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists.

• excerpt from Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph and Other Stories” 📚 💬

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.

Emily Dickinson 📚 💬

“I know an ash, it is called Yggdrasil A hairy tree, moistened by a brilliant cloud.

In the beginning was the tree. The stone ball rushed through emptiness. Under the crust was fire. Rocks boiled, gases seethed. Blebs burst through the crust. Dense salt water clung to the rolling ball. Slime slid on it and in the slime shapes shifted. Any point on a ball is the centre and the tree was at the centre. It held the world together, in the air, in the earth, in the light, in the dark, in the mind.”

Excerpt From Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt 📚 💬

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

• Job 38:4,7 📚 💬
• Also beautifully quoted in Terence Malick’s “The Tree of Life”

I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods’ worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as they must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life.

from “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang 📚 💬

The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think….Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.” - John Adams

from John Adams by David McCullough 📚 💬

“The population of Iceland is 1,000 times smaller than that of the United States. We do not hide behind our apparent lack of superpower status. What we lack in manpower, we make up in volcanoes. But we are still figuring out how to aim them."

—Prime Minister Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson, speaking at a White House dinner for Nordic leaders in May 2016.

From How Iceland Changed the World by Egill Bjarnason 📚 💬

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

Two people met, on a hot May Day, and never later mentioned their meeting. This is how it was.

• from A.S. Byatt, Possession 📚 💬

“For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”

• Isaiah 55:12 📚 💬

Yes, but suddenly one hears a clock tick, We who had been immersed in this world became aware of another. It is pain- ful. It was Neville who changed our time. He who had been thinking with the unlimited time of the mind, which stretches in a flash from Shakespeare to ourselves, poked the fire and began to live by that other clock which marks the approach of a particular person. The wide and dignified sweep of his mind contracted. He became on the alert… . I noted how he touched a cushion. From the myriads of mankind and all time past, he had chosen one person one moment in particular.

• from The Waves by Virginia Woolf 📚💬

These things are there. The garden and the tree

The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold

The woman in the shadow of the boughs

The running water and the grassy space.

They are and were there.

• from A.S. Byatt, Possession 📚 💬

In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.

• from A.S. Byatt, Possession 📚 💬