ৡ⃪evie

“Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. Who needed a shrink of a guru when everyone we met asked us who we were the moment we opned our mouths and they heard the accent?

The truth is, we had no simple answers. Being rattled around in freight trains, open trucks, and ratty ocean-liners, we ended up being a puzzle even to ourselves. At first, that was hard to take; then we got used to the idea. We began to savor it, to enjoy it. Being nobody struck me personally as being far more interesting than being somebody. The streets were full of these "somebodys" putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn't, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too.”
― Charles Simic, Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss

“The purpose of poetry is to return that which is familiar to its original strangeness.”
― Charles Simic

“Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Maybe violence is born in the chasms between us, within us? Maybe the conquest, at its root, has always been about that chasm, a pain so lonely, so unbearable, so spiritually numbing that violence becomes the only path, the narrow trail to being human, to feeling something, anything.”
― Nemonte Nenquimo, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People