Cathryn

“... If you wall a country or a civilization, you misshape it, too, as certainly as if you strangled it with bindings. You have built the wall not just outside but inside, and what you have walled up will be grotesque and stunted, whether you look at it from the moon or elsewhere.”
― Bill Holm, Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of China Essays

“Revisiting the places that captured your heart when you were young is always unwise. You hope they remain trapped in time and that their magic is still potent. But invariably they have changed, just as you have, leaving you questioning your memories and wondering if they are wishful thinking or merely imagined.”
― David Eimer, The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China

“This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“Every language is a way of imagining the world. English, for example, is sharp and precise. Spanish tends to be baroque. It is obvious that they have adapted to the needs of the peoples who speak them, because both have stood the test of time. From time to time, academics accept new words that have already been tested in everyday speech, or accept as correct constructions they previously considered ungrammatical. These new words are leaves on a tree that is already lush with foliage, and the new constructions are the pruning, which helps it to grow; but the tree is still the same tree.”
― Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka