Will Shoemaker

“.. everything is more difficult once you reach man’s estate, everything rings falser, but sometimes the gods offer you flashes of clairvoyance, moments when you contemplate the whole universe, the infinite wheel of worlds, you see yourself, from high up, for few instants truly before leaving, propelled into the next thing, toward the end…”
― Mathias Énard, Zone

“For almost a month I did practically nothing but labor from sunup to sundown, just to maintain the road in the state it had been in when I'd taken over, and the more I worked, the more I saw that the maintenance of this road was the maintenance of my own life, which now, when I looked back on it, seemed to have happened to someone else. My life to this point seemed like a novel, a book written by a stranger even though I alone had the key to it, I alone was a witness to it, even though my life too was constantly being overgrown by grass and weeds at either end. But as I used a grub hoe and a shovel on the road, I used memory to keep the road of my life open into the past, so I could take my thoughts backward to where I wanted to begin remembering.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England

“E. B. White explained it well: To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.”
― Erin Moore, That's Not English: Britishisms, Americanisms, and What Our English Says About Us

“What I discern in each moment is its exhaustion, its death-rattle, and not the transition to the next moment. I generate dead time, wallowing in the asphyxia of becoming.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Fall into Time