But_i_thought_

“For a writer, exile is prison, a severing from the source, and so, courageous or not, he dies in front of our eyes.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“Before he became a father, he imagined the relationship as being like an intensive version of owning a pet. The child, he thought, was essentially a passive, a vessel into which you poured your love. On TV that’s how it looked. Children were silent, dormant; you went into their bedrooms, gazed down at them fondly, drew the blankets over them as they slept.

But in life, he discovered, parenthood was like – it was – living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was primarily to endure, to weather the endless, buffeting storms of unmediated will.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void--...”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“A vast distance exists between a protester and his slogan; the entire history of politics exists in that gap.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends