Shantanu Kishwar

“It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“And there will be a time, not for long, a month is enough, or a week, when every single person will be able to completely fulfill what they were meant to be—everything their bodies and souls have offered them, not what other people have dumped on them.”
― David Grossman, To the End of the Land