pangea

“Little by little I was starting to like Hiruko, which surprised me. “And are you a Buddhist?” I asked her. “No, I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a linguist.” “Is that a religion?” “Not really, but languages can make people happy, and show them what’s beyond death.”
― Yōko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth

“Since I didn’t have a contract I could show him to make him stay, if Tenzo suddenly vanished I would be left with nothing. Tenzo had given me no words, not “lover,” or even “relationship.”
― Yōko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“We Eskimos never hunted because we liked it; we killed only as many animals as we needed to live, then preserved the meat and ate it slowly, never wasting it, and used the skins to make our clothes and shoes,” I explained. “Then foreign fur traders came to trick us, threatening us until soon we were killing as many sea otters as we could because their fur could be sold at high prices. After many years there were no more sea otters nearby, so we started making long trips in search of new hunting grounds.”
― Yōko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth