Jane Hong

“Once, after I somehow came across the word “circumjoviating” and had to look it up—it means “orbiting around Jupiter”—I challenged him to define it. He thought for perhaps five seconds, then guessed, logically and sublimely: “avoiding God.” I have used it that way ever since then—for what other word so concisely describes the experience of ducking one’s deity or conscience or responsibilities? Like so much of what I got from my father, it is a gift of ethics inside a gift of language. And so it came back to me after he died, when I sat there impassively and watched it start to define me: avoiding work, avoiding books, avoiding time, avoiding joy, avoiding reality. I”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir

“Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“Persons who have not experienced the hardships we have met with,” Bulkeley wrote, “will wonder how people can be so inhuman to see their fellow creatures starving before their faces, and afford ’em no relief. But hunger is void of all compassion.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder