bella

“Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to a see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discreet, inaccessible rooms, even the ways there are concealed, with their own lifts and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered into the earth or cremated in the oven. It is hard to imagine what practical purpose this procedure might serve.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Death in the Family

“I should have been happy: as I had dreamed, I was alone with her, that intimacy with the Moon I had so often envied my cousin and with Mrs Vhd Vhd was now my exclusive prerogative, a month of days and lunar nights stretched uninterrupted before us, the crust of the satellite nourished us with its milk, whose tart flavour was familiar to us, we raised our eyes up, up to the world where we had been born, finally traversed in all its various expanse, explored landscapes no Earth-being had ever seen, or else we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes, and yet, and yet, it was, instead, exile.”
― Italo Calvino, The Distance of the Moon

“How did we, how could we have thought we could just leave? Who do we think we are? All it is, is we brought ourselves with us … The horses and the whales and the old women and the sick babies. They’re just us, we’re them, they’re here.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

“You’re convinced everything would be fine if we lived together. If only we could. But you live in a world I don’t recognize. What a halcyon glow our childhood must have for you.”
― Yūko Tsushima, Of Dogs and Walls