Justin •••

“He turned to Maher. "That's how I know you won't make it: you carry stories around. You've got a storybook idea about how it'll end up, you've got a storybook view of the world."

Maher shrugged. "Books are good for the soul," he said. "Books will ween you off cruelty."

"And what will you be left with then?" Mohamed asked.”
― Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise

“My dad was blown up by a tank in Poland, but he left us the car. You want a ride?”
― Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

“Conceivably, though, the sea might have filtered into her body over the years in tiny fragments like the parts of a picture puzzle which, while she'd never identified the whole, had pieced themselves together as the sea in all its sparkling radiance. An internal sea. Untouched by anyone...

Having drunk too much, the mother was beginning to drift off with the sound of the children's high-pitched voices in her ears.

Fragments of the sea... Could she trace the matrix into which she'd fitted them all the way back to the flood of light she'd experienced at the moment of birth? The light was pain. She didn't actually remember that time, of course. She'd thought she was reminded of it when she heard the first cries of her own children: yes, she'd thought then, it was painful and dazzling, and I couldn't help crying. With every cry I was longing to accustom myself to the flood of light. But before my body had time to adjust, the light had ceased to exist as light. Perhaps what I was seeing was the brightness of the internal sea? My mother's sea.

There were other memories. The tale of the Little Mermaid she'd come across in a foreign picture book. Though it would never have occurred to her to see herself in the person of the lovely little princess, she'd been haunted by the idea that perhaps she had been present herself, somewhere in the deeps where the princess lived. She sensed the sea's wan bluish gleam in the Little Mermaid's sobs.”
― Yūko Tsushima, The Shooting Gallery

“At Christmastime I had got out the little artificial fir tree from deep inside the closet and assembled and decorated it with my daughter. That tree, its tiny lights twinkling. Her, motionless before it for a long time, rapt in its multicoloured drops of light. And me, standing back, looking on. To her, it was the most beautiful of sights, countless joys shimmering invitingly in their splendour. It was a cheap tree that Fojino had bought at a local supermarket when she was a year old, saying, 'This'll do for now, won't it? It'll only get broken with her touching it. They're really quite expensive.”
― Yūko Tsushima, Territory of Light