soph ☆

“What does a language retain of the violence it has been used to commit?”
― Mireille Gansel, Translation as Transhumance

“All my mania for culture, for ‘really good’ things, for knowing about jazz recordings and red wine and Danish furniture, even about Keats and Shakespeare and James Baldwin, what if it’s all a form of vanity, or even worse, a little bandage over the initial wound of my origins? I have put between myself and my parents such a gulf of sophistication that it’s impossible for them to touch me now or to reach me at all.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“The thing that does not work in this country is the absence of the spirit of revolt. No new ideas coming from the young. They follow in their forefathers' footsteps trying to do better than them. While the thing that counts is always the breaking away never the progress made.”
― Nanni Balestrini, Tristano

“Some people are curious about a writer’s “creative process.” I can’t explain mine except to say that God is the starting point and the finish line. In other words, when all else fails— and it always does— I pray.”
― Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot