Aswathy

“Gretel dreamed quite a Druhástranian dream. I mean, the absence of inclination to pass commentary, a reluctance to subscribe to any ideology in case the compromise proves catastrophic; those aren’t the only clues as to the Druhástranian nature of this dream. What about the fear that not having a point of view is in some way a crime? If this dream had been dreamed by a non-Druhástranian perhaps it would have had moral or spiritual overtones, or nationalist ones, or Gretel would have dreamed we were in a psychiatric hospital being treated for this chronic lack of a point of view.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread

“To be Druhástranian is to be dissatisfied with one’s condition until one can find some official personage to sign off on it. And if someone says that what you’re doing is all right today, won’t you need to get that approval reconfirmed later, get another stamp at some other desk a year from now? Of course this is a mind-set that a nation can be stunned into. All you need is a century or two of freedoms and strictures that appear and disappear between one year and the next, words and deeds that were frowned upon just yesterday receiving vehement acclaim today.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread

“On the sly, you observe the adults whose childhood lies inside them, torn and full of holes like a used and moth-eaten rug no one thinks about anymore or has any use for. You can’t tell by looking at them that they’ve had a childhood, and you don’t dare ask how they managed to make it through without their faces getting deeply scarred and marked by it. You suspect that they’ve used some secret shortcut and donned their adult form many years ahead of time. They did it one day when they were home alone and their childhood lay like three bands of iron around their heart, like Iron Hans in Grimms’ fairy tale, whose bands broke only when his master was freed. But if you don’t know such a shortcut, childhood must be endured and trudged through hour by hour, through an absolutely interminable number of years. Only death can free you from it, so you think a lot about death, and picture it as a white-robed, friendly angel who some night will kiss your eyelids so that they never will open again.”
― Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood

“Allen Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky— 1958

Tho I long for the actual sunlight contact between us I miss you like a home. Shine back honey & think of me.”
― Allen Ginsberg