Pia

“Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“The unfortunate influence of this style of reading has dictated that we go to writers of color for the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma; that we expect those writers to provide those intellectual commodities the way their ancestors once provided spices, minerals, precious stones, and unprecious bodies.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“It feels impossibly hard and incalculably stupid to commit to that love, to bear it and be borne by it, but that is what I feel—it is the wellspring that reading leads me to, every time. Loving this world, loving being alive in it, means living up to that world; living up to that love. I can’t say I love this world or living in it if I don’t bother to know it; indeed, be known by it. It’s that mutual promise of knowing that reading holds us in—an inheritance that belongs to us, whether we accept it or not. Whether we read its pages or not. This book remains just one small part of that work: that inheritance, and that love.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain