Bharati Challa

“Count all these
sufferings from here to the end of the endless sky which is no
sky and see how many you can add together to make a figure
to impress the Boss of Dead Souls in the Meat Manufactory in
city City CITY everyone of them in pain and born to die,
milling in the streets at 2 A M underneath those imponderable
skies”—their enormous endlessness, the sweep of the Mexican
plateau away from the Moon—living but to die, the sad song
of it I hear sometimes on my roof in the Tejado district,
rooftop cell, with candles, waiting for my Nirvana or my
Tristessa—neither come, at noon I hear “La Paloma” being
played on mental radios in the fallways between the tenement
windows—the crazy kid next door sings, the dream is taking
place right now, the music is so sad, the French horns ache, the
high whiney violins and the deberratarra-rabaratarara of the
Indian Spanish announcer. Living but to die, here we wait on
this shelf, and up in heaven is all that gold open caramel, ope
my door—Diamond Sutra is the sky.”
― Jack Kerouac, Tristessa

“Occassionally one stumbles into a coincidence that, like an unexpected alignment of windows, momentarily cancels out the sense of historical whereabouts, giving with an overwhelming immediacy an awareness of the reality of the past.

The possibility of this awareness is always immanent in old homesites. It may suddenly bear in upon one at the sight of old orchard trees standing in the dooryard of a house now filled with baled hay. It came to me when I looked out the attic window of a disintegrating log house and saw a far view of the cleared ridges with wooded hollows in between, and nothing in sight to reveal the date. Who was I, leaning to the window? When?”
― Wendell Berry, Think Little: Essays

“Yuri took out the compliment and held it up to the light to see if it still blazed as gloriously. 'That's what you mean to me.”
― Jerry Pinto, The Education of Yuri

“You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat