Ami Boughter

“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

“O paradise, to lie in the hammock with one’s book and drink,
not hearing the murmur of consternation as it moves progressively
up the decibel scale. Yet I see you are uncertain where to locate me:
here I am. And I’ve done more thinking about you than you perhaps realize,
yes, a sight more than you’ve done about me. Which reminds me:
when are we going to get together? I mean really—not just for a
drink and a smoke, but really
invade each other’s privacy in a significant way that will make sense
and later amends to both of us for having done so, for I am
short of the mark despite my bluster and my swaggering,
have no real home and no one to inhabit it except you
whom I am in danger of losing permanently as a bluefish slips off
the deck of a ship, as a tuna flounders, but say, you know all that.
What kind of a chump do you think I am, anyway? I would like your
attention, not just your eyes and face. I would like to tell you
how much I love you. I’m a sap for trying, but down deep
in the bowels of the ship we hear something, don’t you agree, that
tells us where we went off course and what we must do to
get back on it only now it’s too late”
― John Ashbery, Flow Chart

“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

“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