laika

“Never finish a war without
starting another. I've seen your true face: the back
of your head. If you were walking away, keep walking.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“Alone and night-neoned, I write read drink drug grieve and all America keeps teaching me
is that there are so many ways to die in America which, frankly, is qwhite confusing
because this country killed you a decade ago and I’m still writing reading drinking
drugging grieving binging binging blacking out in the cozy, claustrophobic home
I’ve made out of how very, very much I miss you and the sky keeps throwing
down consequences and corrections and histories and nations, I mean,
come on, who can blame me for not wanting to go back outside?”
― Saeed Jones, Alive at the End of the World

“Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.”
― James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

“Imagine, I can't stop saying. Imagine, I beg,
when I should have said, Look: paradise
is both a particle and a wave. You don't have
to believe in something for it to startle you awake.”
― Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On