Pushan

“When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it's happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

[...] We die without knowing what we have lived.”
― Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

“That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks “the heaven and the earth, and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?” It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. This was an idea that died hard, if it ever really died at all.”
― Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life

“There is no love of life without despair of life.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays