Natsomji

“Therapy, therapists, promised a rigorous lack of judgment (but wasn’t that an impossibility, to talk to a person and not be judged?), and yet behind every question was a nudge, one that pushed you gently but inexorably toward a recognition of some flaw, toward solving a problem you hadn’t known existed.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He never mentioned whether something was fair, however. Fairness itself seemed to hold very little interest for him, which I found fascinating, as people, especially young people, are very interested in what's fair. Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing principle of kindergartens and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields ... Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn't zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing