Ami Boughter

“My reputation
as a Ladies’ Man was a joke
It caused me to laugh bitterly
through the ten thousand nights
I spent alone
From a third-storey window
above the Parc du Portugal
I’ve watched the snow
come down all day
As usual
there’s no one here
There never is”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

“He had forgotten. Even as he had observed people he was forgetting their very essence. Except perhaps that there was always the possibility that somewhere in the future the naming might begin. But at that moment in time he doubted it. A face returned perhaps, not a face but an expression, not an expression but perhaps a reading of that expression, not what was in the thing observed but in the observer.
The wrong thing named.
And suddenly he was swept by a terrible fear of years having gone by which were filled with wrong meanings. He had been wrong from the very beginning. He knew nothing of the world. It had passed him by. It had all happened in another room.”
― Dermot Healy, A Goat's Song

“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