Ausma

“Perfect. Imperfect. A pair of adjectives that come over and again, in all seasons, day in and day out, taunting us, judging us, isolating us, turning our isolation into illness. Is there a more accomplished adjective than perfect? Perfect is free from comparison, perfect rejects superlative. We can always be good, do better, try our best, but how perfect can we be before we can love ourselves and let others love us? And who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“But you will be back, and you will always be here. Don’t think that in death you go far from the earth; you remain down here with everything—the part of you that loved, which is the most important part. That part of you will patiently be here as the earth changes colour, exhausts itself, breathes in fresh life again, and revives. That part of you will be here all along, through that whole entire time, while the slugs make their sluggish art, beautiful little swirls in the mud, and whatever will populate the sea, and the greatest beasts that will ever be; slippery with green gills and lots of scales, feathers and fur. Even the swimming creatures will have their own ways of moving which will be radically new. And you will be here for that, too! Why am I so stuck in the art of the past? Because you are stuck in this situation, thinking it is the only one. There will be a second draft, and the part of you that loves, which is the best part of you, and the most eternal part, will be in the bears, the lizards, the mammoths, and the birds, there in the second draft of life.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“She picked it up, and the seashell seemed to speak to her, saying, You will have so many more years of living, and the years will draw you far from this time when you feel so bad, and time will crust over everything, and so much more will happen to you, and though the present is all you have right now, it will all be far in the past one day, something from another time, like everything I have moved beyond, as an ancient seashell, I don’t remember my youth, do you think that I do?—and the things I did when I was shiny and new, now I’m an old shell, like you will one day be, so take me with you as a reminder that this present moment will one day be gone, and its troubles buried beneath so many layers of living.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour