Michael Kurrier

“The way she used to sit by the brook on summer evenings and Sunday afternoons, a book in her lap, so caught up in the story that he could sit down next to her, even stroke her hair softly, without her noticing, a world within the world, a magical island in the shoreless sea of the everyday, a place he can never reach...
[from The Remembered Soldier]”
― Anjet Daanje

“I said that the more we can name what we're seeing, the more language we have for it, the less likely we are to destroy it. If you look at the field beside the road and you see merely the generic 'meadow,' you're less likely to care if it's bulldozed for a strip mall than you are if you know that those tall, flat-leaved spires are milkweed, upon which the monarchs have flown two thousand miles to feed, or if you can name sailor's breeches and purslane, lamb's-quarter, or the big umbels of wild carrot feeding the small multitudes. Isn't the world larger and more valuable, if you know what an umbel is?”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“In the morning I walk across the fields in a bright, arid light. When I return I can hear the grand piano being played through the open windows. I stand in the garden and listen. The lucidity of the sound seems more real to me than anything we have left behind us, than home, than the days whose repetition had laid a kind of fetter over my soul. In its solitariness it speaks to my own single nature. It startles me a little, to be spoken to; as though my life, the life of home, were a fake, and the real life was roaming somewhere in the world, fleet-footed, unique, uncapturable, to be glimpsed sometimes through an open window, and then to vanish again.”
― Rachel Cusk, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy

“[Is it] Lying when a person uses his considerable reputation and his mastery of public communications to thrash his opponents by redirecting the attention of the general populace, thus infecting the people with the tiniest sliver of doubt, which, widely propagated, becomes a sizable wedge of doubt? said G.
Doesn't every idea, said R., even those judged by some standards to be fallacious or those which have been disproven outright, deserve to be honored with the public's attention?
Doesn't the public have the right to know? said G.
And decide for itself? said R.
Are you calling the public stupid? said G.
Do you not believe in democracy? said R.
R. turned to me.
We were, in life, eminent scientists, he said.”
― George Saunders, Vigil