Aadya Dubey

“just irrelevant background noise to him? Or did he not care enough even to wonder?”
― Liane Moriarty, Truly Madly Guilty

“This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays

“And here was a summer day, asking to be longer. As if a summer's day wasn't long enough.”
― Ali Smith, Summer

“But that's summer for you. Summer's like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because summer isn't just a merry tale. Because there's no merry tale without darkness.”
― Ali Smith, Summer