Jarrod Vassallo

“How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.”
― David Malouf, The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“But aesthetic value does not rise from the work's apparent ability to predict a future: we do not admire Cézanne because of the Cubists drew on him. Value rises from deep in the work itself - from its vitality, its intrinsic qualities, its address to the senses, intellect, and imagination; from the uses it makes of the concrete body of tradition. In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity. Not even the greatest doctor in Bologna in the 17th century knew as much a bout the human body as today's third-year medical student. But nobody alive today can draw as well as Rembrandt or Goya.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New