Willem

“Now she tried to imagine what she might be if she were living somewhere else. 'What if I were a sparkle perched right on top of the stars, or a bird flitting along from rooftop to rooftop and branch to branch?' she pondered, letting her thoughts spin out of control and become more and more strange. One day, as she sat alone in a corner looking at Atiye, she asked herself, 'Now who is this woman?' Then, turning her eyes on her elder brother and Zekiye, she thought, 'And who're they?' Growing frightened, Dirmit found that the more she looked the less she knew any of these people.”
― Latife Tekin, Sevgili Arsız Ölüm

“Some novels even overdramatize events, which, in real life, happen in a far more unassuming and inconsequential way; they happen, then they're over, they run into one another, floating like clouds scattered by the wind between the odd deceptive pause that turns out to be impossible, because time—which no one understands—stops for nothing.”
― Enrique Vila-Matas, Mac y su contratiempo

“None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. Some lives wait their turn because they haven't been lived at all, while others die before they've lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven't been lived enough.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“I’m going to repeat myself again: jiko—all-inclusive self—is wholly one. That is one/one, two/two, all/all. Jiko is born as wholly one. This wholly one is not simply one human being among all humanity, nor merely one member among all the members of a society—some sort of cog in a wheel. Everything that is seen or heard or felt—everything—forms the content of jiko that is all/all. At the same time, this is also all times/all times. It is the life of all/all, all times / all times that we are actually living out.”
― Tom Wright, Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary