Maya

“A trouble - nothing as beautiful as a sorrow - rose to the surface of his mind, displayed its ungainliness and sank. Its precise nature he did not ask himself, for his hour was not yet, but the hint was appalling, and, hero though he was, he longed to be a little boy again, and to stroll half awake for ever by the colourless sea.”
― Edward Morgan Forster

“For a brief moment the flame lit the palimpsest of his face. Then the chiaroscuro died and his face was no longer legible.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“We said in our introduction that man was an affirmation. We shall never stop repeating it. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a negation. No to man's contempt. No to the indignity of man. To the exploitation of man. To the massacre of what is most human in man: freedom.”
― Franz Fanon

“Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer