Lhoss

“What you would have given to see this, I think. Opportunity presents itself to me so rarely. I am amazed that I still recognized it. Yes, I think, what would you give? Endless Sundays drenched in cathedral bells, the left side of your bed, a good-night kiss instead of a good-bye one, a drawer for my razor and comb, your eyes warm on my face when I am serving you tea in my Mesdames' studio, your desire for me worn there like a red bloom in your lapel.”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“They say on the radio that our children will live better, easier lives in the future, but clearly you think that things will be more difficult for them than it has been for us. There’ll be an atomic war, perhaps?’ ‘Well, yes and no; but it’s not only to do with the bomb. Perhaps there won’t be a war at all – even if there is, it’ll not be soon. Nor am I talking about food problems. Simply, the wheel of time is gathering speed. They’ll have to approach everything on their own, using their own mind, and partly they’ll have to answer for what we did in the past. It’s always hard to have to think things out. Therefore, I say, life will be harder for them than it has been for us.”
― Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years

“But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad’s coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? Where does it begin, where does it end?”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“To walk by without blinking an eye is to say to each other that we are human, whole, a man or a woman like any other, two lungfuls of air, a heart pumping blood, a stomach hungry for home-cooked food, a body in constant search for the warmth of the sun. Before I came to the rue de Fleurus, GertrudeStein, the only way I knew how to hold onto that moment of dispensation, that without-blinking-an-eye exchange, to keep it warm in my hands, was by threading silver through them. Blood makes me a man. No one can take that away from me, I thought. But as you know, GertrudeStein, in order for me to stay at the rue de Fleurus, I have had to give up the habit that has sustained me.”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt