Ami Boughter

“The whole of the Irish landscape, in John Montague's words, is a manuscript which we have lost the skill to read.”
― Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978

“I knew it wasn’t a good idea to place the least trust in household objects; as soon as we become accustomed to the silent presence of a thing, it gets broken or disappears. My ties to the people around me were also marked by those two modes of impermanence: breaking up or disappearing.All that has survived from that period are the echoes of certain conversations, a handful of recurrent ideas, poems I liked and read over and over until I knew them by heart. Everything else is a later elaboration. It’s not possible for my memories of that life to have more substance. They are scaffolding, structures, empty houses.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd

“Nothing ever comes to an end. Wherever one has sunk roots that emanate from one’s best or truest self, one will always find a home. To return is not to revisit something that has failed. I can walk along the old paths without bitterness that other feet are now taking pleasure in them. The sea is there just as it always has been.”
― Liv Ullmann

“What I actually had on my mind that year in New York - had on my mind as opposed to in my mind- was a longing for California, a homesickness, a nostalgia so obsessive that nothing else figured. In order to discover what was on my mind I needed room. I needed room for the rivers and for the rain and for the way almonds came into blossom around Sacramento, room for irrigation ditches and room for the fear of kiln fires, room in which to play with everything I remembered and did not understand.”
― Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean