Dustin Wayne

“What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“But just as a toaster used as a doorstop is still a machine designed to toast bread, you – whatever you choose to do with your life – are still a machine designed to propagate your genes. All of us are. It’s what the priests, the sages and philosophers searched for in vain: the ultimate explanation for our existence.”
― Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

“Maxims & Other Quotes II
Exactly how we deal with our souls was at this moment the only question I thought worth asking. 181

Borges: What I most admire about Whitman is that he created Walt Whitman, an ideal projection not of himself but someone like him, a character every reader could find in his heart and admire. 184

Borges: Mythos, in Greek, is not a story that is false, it’s a story that is more than true. Myth is a tear in the fabric of reality, and immense energies pour through those holy fissures. Our stories, our poems, are rips in these holy fissures, as well, however slight. 193

Borges: Don’t question survival, mine or yours. More powers lie at your disposal than you realize. 194

Parini: I just don’t know enough.
Borges: Nor I. But we all proceed on insufficient knowledge. 195

Borges: I’ve found a name for myself. Borges the Reenactor! The problem is, one never wins old battles. The losses only mount. 250

Borges: Remember that the battle between good and evil persists, and the writer’s work is constantly to reframe the argument, so that readers make the right choices. Never work from vanity. … What does Eliot say? ‘Humility is endless’ … We fail, and we fail again. We pick ourselves up. I’ve done it a thousand times, Guiseppe. Borges only deepens. 251”
― Jay Parini, Borges and Me: An Encounter

“If there are signs. If, in the next cell an impossible neighbor, because on the other side of the wall are just the cliffs and sea, starts to tap to give you an escape plan with crescents, gears, triangles and crosses. If life is a test of perspicacity, or, what might be one in the same of personality - draw a tree, draw a person. Put these drawings in the order they occurred. Interpret the multicolored butterflies spread over the page. They must appear from where you least expected. Heteroclite and elusive above all, making you doubt not them but yourself. Making you blush before your own paranoia. And making you try to forget it. To return to the pervasive conspiracy of normality.

But the tapping on the wall won’t let you sleep. And the privation of sleep leads to hallucinations and insanity. And in the end, inevitably, to the illusion that you hear tapping on the wall. And all this until the metronome stops. And you have yet to give an answer.”
― Cărtărescu Mircea