S L

“It can be difficult to distinguish forbearance from resignation, sorrow from partial reconciliation, fortitude from loneliness. I thought about how difficult it can be to tell these emotions apart on the basis of facial expressions and gestures, about how the person in question may struggle to distinguish these feelings in themselves”
― han kang, We Do Not Part

“If we were to remove the conscious component from our ongoing mental states, you and I would still have images flowing in our minds, but those images would be unconnected to us as singular individuals. The images would not be owned by you or me or anyone else. They would flow unmoored. No one would know to whom such images belonged. Sisyphus would be fine. He is a tragic figure only because he knows that the abominable predicament is his.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you’re left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific”
― David Szalay, Flesh

“A writer I like left behind a passage like this in one of his books:
"People forget all kinds of things. They live by forgetting. Yet our thoughts endure, the way waves leave traces in the sand." Deep down, I hope that's true. It gives me great hope.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop