Being born’s a hell of a lottery.
People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can’t.
I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.
We live on, as long as there are people to live on in.
Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen.
Persuasion is not about force; it’s about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it.
People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.
You only value something if you know it’ll end.
If an atrocity isn’t written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die. That’s what I can’t stand. If a mass shooting, a bomb, a whatever, is written about, then at least it’s made a tiny dent in the world’s memory. Someone, somewhere, some time, has a chance of learning what happened. And, just maybe, acting on it. Or not. But at least it’s there.
If life didn’t change, it wouldn’t be life, it’d be a photograph.
I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it retrospectively.
Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you... No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.
Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.
Love is the anesthetic applied by Nature to extract babies.
Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers.
If you love and are loved, whatever you do affects others.
For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free.
Art feasts upon its maker.
Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul.
For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of.