Karina G

“Lately, it's really been bothering me that, I don't know, the way people work like this every day from morning to night is kind of weird. Hasn't it ever struck you as strange? I mean, all I do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. I don't have to think at all. It's like I just put my brain in a locker before I start work and pick it up on the way home. I spend seven hours a day at a workbench, planting hairs into wig bases, then I eat dinner in the cafeteria, take a bath, and of course I have to sleep, like everybody else, so out of a twenty-four-hour day, the amount of free time I have is nothing. And because I'm so tired from work, the "free time" I have I mostly spend lying around in a fog. I don't have any time to sit and think about anything. Of course, I don't have to work at weekends, but then I have to catch up on the laundry and cleaning, and sometimes I go into town, and before I know it the weekend is over”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“The practice of gratitude lets us hear the badgering of marketers as the stomach grumblings of a Windigo. It celebrates cultures of regenerative reciprocity, where wealth is understood to be having enough to share and riches are counted in mutually beneficial relationships. Besides, it makes us happy.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“This cycle of reactions versus expectations was becoming the new currency in our marriage. I worried we were doomed to never return to a place of mutual compassion and patience”
― Mark Lukach, My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward

“We were happy with our married life and had no problems to speak of. And yet there were times when I couldn't help sensing an area inside Kumiko to which I had no access. In the middle of the most ordinary-of the most excited - conversation, and without the slightest warning, she might sink into silence. It would happen all of a sudden, for no reason at all (or at least no reason I could discern). It was like walking along the road and all of a sudden falling into a pit. Her silences never lasted very long, but afterwards, until a fair amount of time had gone by, it was as if she were not really there.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle