Clare Boucher

“What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series): As heard on BBC Radio 4

“Our identities are given but also made. We can’t choose our parents, but we can choose who we become. ‘Basically I’m Chinese,’ Franz Kafka wrote in a postcard to his fiancée. If I say ‘basically I’m a central European’ I’m not literally claiming descent from the central European Yiddish writer Asch, but declaring an elective affinity.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

“Nationalists prop themselves up by imagining they are living in a circle of virtue outside which shamble those not so blessed, despite their having near-identical beliefs and stews. Perhaps a distinction can be made between patriotism, which is a legitimate, sometimes vexed affection for and pride in the world one grows up in and knows well, and nationalism, where that central space tends to be hollow but given shape by the imagined foibles, vices and plots of those others about which, in practice, one knows little or nothing.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of France, Germany and the Countries In Between

“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.” “Yes! It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less