LKay

“At some point in the past, someone reading this book had felt moved to take a pen and draw a line under these words. It made me happy to think that because I had been moved by that same passage too, I was now connected to that stranger. Another time, I happened to find a pressed flower someone had left as a bookmark. As I inhaled the scent of the long-ago-faded flower, I wondered about the person who had put it there. Who in the world was she? When did she live? What was she feeling?”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“An insect, its name lost among those orders of creatures who number in the millions, has somehow found its way into the kitchen sink. This is not an indoor bug, not one of the ordinary housemates who dwell in the corners of the kitchen cabinets, beneath the unmade beds. How easy it would be to wash this bug out with the pasta water in the pot that has been soaking overnight, but please hold back. Surely the world harbors death enough already. It’s too easy to choose ease, too convenient to choose convenience, but try to take the harder path, for the harder path is not very hard. The creature scurries into the corner of the sink and tries to climb the slick walls. Reach toward it. When it climbs into your palm, gently close your fingers around it. Be careful to hold your thumb to the side. If you never close your thumb around your fingers, you will make of your hand a sanctuary. You will make of your hand safe passage to the world.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I took the garbage out into the hallway and threw it down the trash chute. Having a trash chute was one of my favorite things about my building. It made me feel important, like I was participating in the world. My trash mixed with the trash of others. The things I touched touched things other people had touched. I was contributing. I was connecting.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation