Esha

“Conversely, there are places I bid farewell to long before knowing I must leave, places and people whose disappearance I rehearse not just to learn how to live without them when the time comes but to put off their loss by foreseeing it a bit at a time beforehand. I live in the dark so as not to be blinded when darkness comes. I do the same with life, making it more conditional and provisional than it already is, so as to forget that one day my birthday will come around and I won’t be there to celebrate it.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“It is only when it’s too late that one comes to understand how close one came to bliss … or how needless our sorrows were when they drove us to despair.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“One death is heavier than ten and a hundred are weightless.”
― Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water

“… dreamy Tuscan landscape whose peculiar spell is to make you think that it’s yours forever. That you’re here to stay. That time actually stopped the moment you left the highway and drove down a pine-flanked road that steals your breath each time you spot the house whose sole purpose on earth, it seems, is to compress in the space of seven days the miracle of a lifetime.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere