olivia

“There was something insecure about that chimera too, about whoever had engineered it. To construct what amounts to a wall of devouring, you must be really afraid of something. Maybe that’s what happens when annihilation is no longer speculative but a fact of national and personal history. That’s the easy answer. The more disturbing one is that this wall represented nothing new, that it was no more spectacular than the rituals of lynching, that the mob too was insecure, that its rituals too spoke to white men’s violent impotence. And oddly enough, I had the same feeling as I left the City of David—that I was in the presence of a violent impotence. It all felt so fake. And beholding the redemption of Eretz Israel, the ostensible homecoming of an ancient people, announced in 3D projection and accessed via zip line, I could not escape the feeling of being in the presence of a poorly wrought fairy tale and an enormous con. I was in the land that Uris so adored, where the New Jew “spits in the eye of the Arab hordes.” But the very violence and force that emanated even from the City of David spoke to the disquiet and fear that resided somewhere deep inside Israel. The state doth protest too much. It occurred to me that if Jewish national honor had indeed been redeemed, the Israelis themselves did not quite believe it.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But if you seek the truth you must approach the unknown. Lean into it. Wait for it to speak to you. Are you willing to pass that threshold?”
― Mark Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks

“From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle