vy

“Here we were taught that the world could be described, and even explained, by means of simple answers to intelligent questions. That in its essence the world was inert and dead, governed by fairly simple laws that needed to be explained and made public — if possible with the aid of diagrams. We were required to do experiments. To formulate hypotheses. To verify. We were inducted into the mysteries of statistics, taught to believe that equipped with such a tool we would be able to perfectly describe all the workings of the world — that ninety per cent is more significant than five.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Em sẽ không nhìn đôi guốc nữa, em sẽ nhìn khuôn mặt của cô, khuôn mặt sẽ không bao giờ cũ, khuôn mặt sẽ không bao giờ bị gãy gót.”
― Nguyễn Ngọc Thuần, Vừa Nhắm Mắt Vừa Mở Cửa Sổ

“This journal from freshman year is the only thing I can give you. I’m not your everything anymore, so even though I want to love you now, all I can do is give you the old me, the one you once loved.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I’d taken everyone I loved and killed them off in my heart, one by one. I’d long been tending their graves—secretly visiting and mourning during the day, going out and erecting a cross on starry nights, lying inside and awaiting my own death on starless nights. That was my Atlantis, the kingdom I’d built in the name of separation. I’d never before unearthed so much of myself, and so suddenly at that. Inside the world of my tomb, everyone else was dead, I alone survived, and that was the reason for my sorrow.
It didn’t take long to spot the largest sarcophagus. It was the one in which Shui Ling had been entombed, and across the front, it read: This woman is madly in love with me. And then reality finally hit me. I had my old schema (which offered a peephole, really) to blame for my decision to leave this woman, to kill her and preserve her body in this sarcophagus, where she’d stay mine forever. I’d evaded the perils of real relationships and robbed her of the ability to change with time. These two prospects had given rise to “my deep-rooted fear of a real separation, which in turn yielded the avoidant mentality that had only hastened it.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile