• he always forgot; he was always made to remember. (hanya yanahigara, “a little life”)

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• and sometimes those stories, like the presence of the Lord, are hard to believe. unless believing is what makes them true. (mitch albom, “the stranger in the lifeboat”)

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• there are many kinds of selfishness in this world, but the most selfish is hoarding time, because none of us know how much we have, and it is an affront to God to assume there will be more. (mitch albom, “finding chika”)

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• why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? (han kang, “human acts”)

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• this what it means to be modern in Asia today: you are required to detach yourself from the past and live only in the present, without considering the people who shaped you. to remember is to be nostalgic, or, even worse, colonised. to write about your heritage and all the elements that make you and the society you live in different – and complicated and sometimes painful – is to be weak. (tash aw, “strangers on a pier”)

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• you can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving. (paul kalanithi, “when breath becomes air”)

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• this and this and this, i said to him. i did not have to fear that i spoke too much. i did not have to worry that i was too slender or too slow. this and this and this! (madeline miller, “the song of achilles”)

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• my mom’s favorite joke is about a spider and a centipede having tea. the centipede gets up and offers to go buy snacks. he goes out the door and hours pass. the spider is so hungry, wondering what happened, and opens the door, only to find the centipede sitting on the doormat, still putting on his shoes. i imagine myself the centipede, struggling to tie each of my hundred tiny shoes, it takes me longer to get going than most. but i will put on shoe after shoe after shoe until i can get up and go again. (chanel miller, “know my name”)

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• so i want to ask you the same question i ask myself every time I’m entranced by the beauty of this world: what does it mean to love this place? what does it mean to love anyone or anything, in a world whose vanishing is accelerating, perhaps beyond our capacity to save the things that we love most? we can rejoin the web of life. we do not have to be its destroyer. (emily johnston via ayana elizabeth johnson’s, “all we can save”)

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• i can see the sun, but even if i cannot see the sun, i know that it exists. and to know that the sun is there - that is living. (fyodor dostoevsky, “the brothers kamarazov”)

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