Shawn

“In order to gain something, you have to lose something,” she always said. People are always trying to get something for nothing. But that’s just theft. If you’ve gained something, it means that someone, somewhere, has lost something. Even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune. She often reminded me of this. In fact, she considered it one of the laws of the universe.”
― Genki Kawamura, If Cats Disappeared from the World

“Every day people sleep, wake up, work, and eat according to the established set of rules we call time. In other words, we set our lives by the clock. Human beings went through the trouble of inventing rules that imposed limits on their lives, boxing them up into hours, days, and years. And then they invented clocks to make time’s rule over us even more precise.”
― Genki Kawamura, If Cats Disappeared from the World

“I don’t think we can separate the art from the artist, nor should we need to. I think we can look at a piece of art as the transformed or redeemed aspect of an artist, and marvel at the miraculous journey that the work of art has taken to arrive at the better part of the artist’s nature. Perhaps beauty can be measured by the distance it has travelled to come into being.

That bad people make good art is a cause for hope. To be human is to transgress, of that we can be sure, yet we all have the opportunity for redemption, to rise above the more lamentable parts of our nature, to do good in spite of ourselves, to make beauty from the unbeautiful, and to have the courage to present our better selves to the world.

The moon is high and yellow in the sky outside my window. It is a display of sublime beauty. It is also a cry for mercy — that this world is worth saving. Mostly, though, it is a defiant articulation of hope that, despite the state of the world, the moon continues to shine. Hope too resides in a gesture of kindness from one broken individual to another or, indeed, we can find it in a work of art that comes from the hand of a wrongdoer. These expressions of transcendence, of betterment, remind us that there is good in most things, rarely only evil. Once we awaken to this fact, we begin to see goodness everywhere, and this can go some way in setting right the current narrative that humans are shit and the world is fucked.”
― Nick Cave

“Our greatest regrets in life tend not to be the things we did wrong or failed to achieve; but rather the missed opportunities or things we didn't do that we wish we had.”
― Anoir Ou-chad