jux

“Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“When Amana was about three years old, she'd taken her back to her parents' house. One day, while they were sitting face-to-face playing cat's cradle in the room with the grandfather clock, she saw capillaries growing out of their bodies like tiny branches. Slender as gossamer from a spider's web, they spread out along the walls and up to the ceiling, twining themselves around the grandfather clock. Quaking in fear, Marika stood up. Until then, she had never seriously thought about the history of that house. Generations of people whose names she didn't know, whom she'd never cared about, had been born and died there. The sweat of women forced to work like slaves drenched the walls; the pillars were splattered with the semen of masters of this house who had forced themselves on young servants. She smelled the cold sweat of a son who had strangled his bedridden father to get his inheritance. The walls and ceiling that had witnessed these atrocities glared down on her. The misery of married couples trickling down into the pipes connecting the toilet to the sewer. A mother who has chemically transformed her loneliness into ambition chokes her son, squeezing his slender neck between her sweaty thighs. A wife who never lets on what she knows about her husband's affairs mixes her own turds into his miso soup. That handsome arsonist seen loitering around the house might be a former employee, fired for no good reason. The umbilical cord binding the generations of a respectable old family is also a rope around the neck. And she had wanted to cut her ties to all these bloody forebearers, now taking such pleasure in sharing old family secrets... My real family, she thought, are those people I just happened to meet in that coffee shop.”
― Yōko Tawada, The Emissary

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“So che fucilerai Gerineldo” disse serenamente, “e non posso far nulla per impedirlo. Ma ti avverto di una cosa: non appena avrò visto il cadavere, te lo giuro sulle ossa di mio padre e di mia madre, sulla memoria di José Arcadio Buendìa, te lo giuro davanti a Dio, che ti verrò a prendere fin dove ti sarai cacciato e ti ammazzerò con le mie stesse mani.” Prima di lasciare la stanza, senza attendere risposta, concluse:
“Avrei fatto la stessa cosa se tu fossi nato con la coda di maiale.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude