rohini

“Imagine something. Something that fits in the dark. Say the dark is the sky at night. Imagine something in it.”
“A star?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t. I can’t see it.”
“Okay. Don’t try to see it. Try to be it. Would you like to know what it’s like to be one? Be a star?”
“A movie star?”
“No, a star star. In the sky. Keep your eyes closed, think about what it feels like to be one.” He moved over to her and kissed her shoulder. “Imagine yourself in that dark, all alone in the sky at night. Nobody is around you. You are by yourself, just shining there. You know how a star is supposed to twinkle? We say twinkle because that is how it looks, but when a star feels itself, it’s not a twinkle, it’s more like a throb. Star throbs. Over and over and over. Like this. Stars just throb and throb and throb and sometimes, when they can’t throb anymore, when they can’t hold it anymore, they fall out of the sky.”
― Toni Morrison, Tar Baby

“Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“You see, in our family we don't know whether we're coming or going - it's all my grandmother's fault. But, of course, the fault wasn't hers at all: it lay in language. Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays