"Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies — all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones — and the eternally disappointed ones. Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption."

Erich Fromm | The Art of Loving

"When I kiss my daughter goodnight and wish her sweet dreams, she understands my wish for her is kind, but she knows, as all children do, that it’s impossible to be told by our parents what our dreams are supposed to be like. They know they have to dream themselves out of life and back into it, because life must always win us back."

Deborah Levy | Swimming Home

"I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day."

Deborah Levy | Swimming Home

60 thoughts about turning 60

1. People who “hate getting old” are idiots. Every year is a privilege. Let me tell you, callow miserabilists: getting to 60 feels like a triumph.

6. When someone starts a sentence “I’m not being…”, they always are.

8. All these memories darting through my mind like discarded fairground goldfish in a sewer. The random kindnesses of strangers, how they glide and shimmer.

17. The scarier the world becomes, the more important it is to focus on the correct use of “less” and “fewer”.

35. There is not a single bad mood that cannot be lifted, however grudgingly, by reading a Larkin poem.

Voyage

"We are not special.
We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are.
We just are, and what happens just happens."

"One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection."

Recitative

Every night, we couldn’t sleep.
Our upstairs neighbors had to keep
Dropping something down the hall—
A barbell or a bowling ball,

And from the window by the bed,
Echoing inside my head,
Alley cats expended breath
In arias of love and death.

Dawn again, across the street,
Jackhammers began to beat
Like hangovers, and you would frown—
That well-built house, why tear it down?

Noon, the radiator grill
Groaned, gave off a lesser chill
So that we could take off our coats.
The pipes coughed to clear their throats.

Our nerves were frayed like ravelled sleeves,
We cherished each our minor griefs
To keep them warm until the night,
When it was time again to fight;

But we were young, did not need much
To make us laugh instead, and touch,
And could not hear ourselves above
The arias of death and love.

A. E. Stallings

"It’s not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky."

"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."

"There will be mistakes, and maybe the point is not to forget the rest of yourself if one little part might go bad."

Start of Darkness

Myopia does not obscure the world, but gradually softens it. In its milder forms, it eradicates sharp lines, rendering the world a hazy, often more-attractive place. Trees dissolve into Dr. Seuss-like clumps of feathery green; pores and wrinkles simply dissolve. As myopia advances, however, boundaries between objects break down, causing discrete monochrome units like fingers to merge into indistinct blocks of color. The world of the myope finds its artistic expression in Impressionism. Without glasses, the Rouen cathedral bears an uncanny resemblance to a painting by Monet.

"The feeling that Bosnians call sevdah — a feeling of pleasant soul pain, when you are at peace with your woeful life, which allows you to enjoy this very moment with abandon."

Aleksandar Hemon | Nowhere Man

"The hard part in writing a narrative of someone’s life is choosing from the abundance of details and microevents, all of them equally significant, or equally insignificant. If one elects to include only the important events: the births, the deaths, the loves, the humiliations, the uprisings, the ends and the beginnings, one denies the real substance of life: the ephemera, the nethermoments, much too small to be recorded (the train pulling into the station where there is nobody; a spider sliding down an invisible rope and landing on the floor just in time to be stepped on; a pigeon looking straight into your eyes; a tender hiccup of the person standing in front of you in line for bread; an unintelligible word muttered by a one-night stand, sleeping naked and nameless next to you). But you cannot simply list all the moments when the world tickles your senses, only to seep away between your fingers and eyelashes, leaving you alone to tell the story of your life to an audience interested only in the fireworks of universal experiences, the roller coaster rides of sympathy and judgment."

Aleksandar Hemon | Nowhere Man

"There was a time, I freely confess, when I thought it noble not to know where one was heading. I thought that being lost meant being in mid-chapters of one’s own Bildungsroman, but then I became very lonesome climbing up the steep, craggy cliff of self-knowledge. I kept reading and thinking, and thinking and reading, and drinking, in order to figure out what life was all about, and whose fault it all was, before I even started living."

Aleksandar Hemon | Nowhere Man