Michael Kurrier

“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

“During the day, the light flooding in would make the room seem a little sad, despite the roses. It would be an evening room. But in the winter, with the curtains drawn, some spots illuminated--the bookcase corner, the record shelves, the desk, the low table between the two settees, and the vague reflections in the mirror--and large expanses in shadow, whence all things would gleam--the polished wood, the rich, heavy silks, the cut glass, the softened leather--it would be a haven of peace, a land of happiness.”
― Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties / A Man Asleep

“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 January, meeting a friend at Bristol airport, I stood at the arrivals gate and watched as people poured in from the Canary Islands, from Tenerife. Back they came,in their shorts and string vests and sombreros, in their tanned orange skin; back they came to the bad-tempered homeland and went whooping out through the automatic doors into its dark and inhospitable evening. In a way, I envied them. I have never been able to evade the issue so, with human beings or with anything else. There has to be a reckoning, an accounting. There has, at some point to be the truth.”
― Rachel Cusk, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy