Dani Austria

“Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“I wanted to give you something you can wear, so Yoko and I went up to Sendai together and chose a watch, one we thought looked most like you. I know you don't need to worry about time anymore, but I thought you don't have anything on your own...”
― Yu Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station

“Afterward, through the dreary and uninteresting months and years, one finds that life is really all about small and apparently insignificant choices that one makes, again and again, choices that add up to a life. And one comes to realize, too, but oftentimes, dying, in any manner, is not the point. Rather, it is the living through long periods of attending to mostly humdrum duties, working with people of varied, oftentimes conflicting dispositions and persuasions, and managing to keep one's sense of fairness and decency intact through life's trying confinements, departures, and various other adversities.”
― Priscilla Supnet Macansantos, Departures

“Modern life, theorists like Derrida explain, is full of atomized individuals, casting about for a center and questioning the engine of their lives. His writing is famously intricate, full of citations and abstruse terminology. Things are always already happening. But reflecting on his own relationships tended to give his thinking and writing a kind of desperate clarity. The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, “one must love the future.” Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief. We”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir