Mar wa

“The songs are full of nostalgia, which is to say they are full of mourning; one remembers that which came before, often with a fond sadness, a want to return, despite knowing to return to a memory is to morph it, to warp it.
Every time you remember something, the memory weakens, as you’re remembering the last recollection, rather than the memory itself. Nothing can remain intact. Still, it does not stop you wanting, does not stop you longing.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“No one is just a victim or a victor. Everyone is somewhere in between. People who go around casting themselves as one or the other are not only kidding themselves, but they’re also painfully unoriginal.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“And suddenly it struck me that walking the length of Nevsky Prospekt was like walking the length of Russian literature. Right there at the beginning—just off the avenue on the Moika embankment—is the house where Pushkin ended his years. A few paces on are the rooms where Gogol began Dead Souls. Then the National Library, where Tolstoy scoured the archives. And here, behind the cemetery walls, lies brother Fyodor, our restless witness of the human soul entombed beneath the cherry trees.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the eloquence of her beauty”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned