Kirabo

“I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”
― Toni Morrison

“I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.”
― Bohumil Hrabal

“Against Fate

Hey, Fate! When you fail a man, you spend
all your time digging a well to trap him.
Then you untie the well's wheel rope so that it can roll.
And you keep the poor mortal struggling up, only to fall back.
You show him a bushel of means and say
"This is it. Worry about it, and dream."

Meanwhile you spin the wheel of fortune and fill
the house of the wicked with jewels,
while you force the just and scrupulous
to sweep up the pieces.
And the man who should not even tend pigs
rides a horse as a cavalier.
And without a shovel, you scoop ruin onto the house
of the honorable and the just.

Fate, if I speak evil of you, you'll claim
the man is jealous and confused
But why do you look crossly at the learned
and make the ignorant the landlord?
Hey, why toss the bread of the wise
so far down the valley?

And why should I believe in your justice
When you don't serve it to anyone important?
Not that you keep either oath or bargain, treacherous one.
Whomever you love today and who is raised to a golden throne,
tomorrow may be sitting in ashes.
How can such a fraudulent judge make a just decision?
Fate, friend of the deceitful and devious, you are harsh to the honest.
What more can I say except that someday I expect
you to mix up sky and earth and sea.”
― Frik

“Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.

But they expected nothing else: she was very young.”
― Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife