Huong Diotte

“We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”
― Franz Kafka

“Or rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she'd been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall. Sometimes I spotted her in a crowd, or in a taxicab pulling away, and these glimpses of her I treasured despite the fact that I was never able to catch up with her.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn’t it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and we constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter.”
― Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke