Kate Esther

“say you get caught inside one fixed idea of things, and you’re always clinging to it or whatever… that shit puts a block inside you. So now the river’s gotta move around this big fuck-off rock, and the more rocks you add to it, the more it starts flowing in weird ways, awkward diversions and stuff. And now you’re blocked up inside yourself, so you start to put blocks outside yourself too, in the world. Y’know?”
― Colin Walsh, Kala

“I wish you had made me an enemy, I said, rather than yourself. Mothers, i thought, would be perfect for that role.

You can't be that for me, Mommy, Nikolai said. I've found a perfect enemy in myself.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“The priest who once supervised me as a student had once said to me that a person only has to step sideways for everything to look different. He'd been talking about the priest's role as a director of souls. I don't know why I remembered it so vividly, because he said all sorts of clever things, but I reasoned it was because it was true, and because it was something I needed to know and thus found significant. People disappeared into their own lives and conflicts, and in doing so they lost perspective, not only on where they were, but also on who they were, and who they had been or could become.
But stepping sideways in one's own life was well nigh impossible.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star

“The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy. Which is why most people spend their time looking the other direction.”
― Colin Walsh, Kala