Vartika

“You used to doubt what you had perceived, but never what others invented. You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm: you could stop, speed up, or slow down; go backward or jump into the future. As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you.”
― Édouard Levé, Suicide

“Why does the past do this? Why does it linger instead of receding? Why does it return with such a force sometimes that the real place in which one stands or sits or lies, the place in which one's corporeal body most undeniably exists, dissolves as if it were nothing more than a mirage? The past cannot be grasped; it is not possible to return in time, to regather what was lost or carelessly shrugged off, so why these sudden ambushes, these flourishes of memory?”
― Olivia Laing, To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

“The present, the present. It never stops, no matter how weary you get. It comes unstintingly, as a river does, and if you aren't careful, you'll be swept off your feet.”
― Olivia Laing

“First there is the World. Then there is the Other World. The Other World is where I sometimes lose my footing. In its calendar turnings, its preinvented existence. The barrage of twists and turns where I sometimes get weary trying to keep up with it, minute by minute adapt: the world of the stoplight, the no-smoking signs, the rental world, the split-rail fencing shielding hundreds of miles of barren wilderness from the human step. A place where by virtue of ha ing been born centuries late one is denied access to earth of space, choice or movement. The brought up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion. The Other World where I've always felt like an alien.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration