Mahmoud Darwish, from Journal of an Ordinary Grief (tr. from the Arabic by Ibrahim Muhawi)
[Text ID: A place is not only a geographical area; it's also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood.]
Elena, 2012.
“I am forever denouncing this therapeutic obsession that governs our modern society, scared of living and haunted by death. We must protect ourselves from everything, heal from everything. Nowadays, food, music, painting, hiking… everything is repurposed as a method for healing, for keeping fit, for keeping healthy, when these activities are first and foremost opportunities for pleasure, desire, gratitude, knowledge, wonderment, and bonding with others. Our entire culture, as well as politics, imposes on all citizens this endless and nagging preoccupation with mental and physical health.”
— Jacqueline Kelen, L’Esprit de Solitude
I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Jihyun Yun, from Some Are Always Hungry; “Reversal”
[Text ID: “I so want to survive this. Please lead me whole into another season so I may dare begin again.”]
the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way
“As a child I paid very little attention to authors’ names; they were irrelevant; I did not believe in authors. To be perfectly candid, this is still true. I do not believe in authors. A book exists, it’s there. The author isn’t there — some grown-up you never met — may even be dead. The book is what is real. You read it, you and it form a relationship, perhaps a trivial one, perhaps a deep and lasting one. As you read it word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and reread, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul. Where, in all this, does the author come in? Like the God of the eighteenth-century deists, only at the beginning. Long ago, before you and the book met each other. The author’s work is done, complete; the ongoing work, the present act of creation, is a collaboration by the words that stand on the page and the eyes that read them.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin, from “Books Remembered,” Children’s Book Council Calendar xxxvi:2 (November 1977)
