Nudrat

“I let her leave without saying goodbye and sat in the pool of silence that followed the crash of the front door slamming shut. This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“The past is like the Gran Cavallo and you can’t fix the Gran Cavallo, right? I mean, sure, who doesn’t fantasize about drawing in the rest of the horse, and maybe the sky around the horse. But what would the painting be worth then? Absolutely nothing. So it is what it is. Imperfect, unfinished, forever. We just have to move on, call it a masterpiece, even if it’s not, and start working on a new goddamned painting.” “I suppose I didn’t realize that’s what it would feel like getting older,” Phoebe confesses.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“But Phoebe is starting to understand that on some nights, Lila is probably the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“You write about the people you owe your discomfort to, and no one reads you, you denounce the conditions you work in and no one notices, you scream and no one hears, everything remains as it is, unresolved, in your lecture hall and in the world, so that exhaustion sets in and you say who gives a fuck, bring on the catastrophe, let everything go to hell, when we hit rock bottom we'll feel the impact, and then the sparks will finally fly, iron to iron, and everything will go up in flames, and then we'll rebuild the right way. But, meanwhile, as we wait for that to happen, life goes by, and goes by ever more debased, ours and those of the children who parade past us year after year, and we never really hit rock bottom, debasement yes, old age yes, death yes, but never the bottom, no, it can always get worse. Therefore, I concluded, I'll tell you how I see it. I don't want to feel like I have to declare that the best would still be the best even if I weren't their teacher, and the worst are still the worst even though I'm their teacher. Shitty pay or not, forthcoming apocalypse or not, I want to say, here, quietly, that I feel less sad - yes, less sad - if I work like a slave because the ones who would do well anyway do better thanks to my work, and because those who would, in any case, do poorly learn to do better thanks to me.”
― Domenico Starnone, Confidenza