Yogarshi

“A fragment for my friend--
If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you
Silent, my starship suspended in night”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Controls is about fear, see. If you’re afraid enough of the reprisals, you don’t say no, you don’t fight back, you don’t run away. Saying yes is how you survive. It becomes normal. Horrible, but normal. Horrible, because it’s normal. Now, lucky you can say ‘Not standing up to him is giving him permission,’ but if you’ve been fed this diet since the year dot, there is no standing up. Victims aren’t cowards. Outsiders, like, they never have a clue how brave you have to be just to carry on.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“Purity, a concept that recalled flowers, the piquant mint taste of a mouthwash, a child clinging to its mother’s gentle breast, was something that joined all these directly to the concept of blood, the concept of swords cutting down iniquitous men, the concept of blades slashing down through the shoulder to spray the air with blood. And to the concept of seppuku. The moment that a samurai “fell like the cherry blossoms,” his blood-smeared corpse became at once like fragrant cherry blossoms. The concept of purity, then, could alter to the contrary with arbitrary swiftness. And so purity was the stuff of poetry. For Isao, to die purely seemed easy. But what about laughing purely? How to be pure in all respects was a problem that disturbed him. No matter how tight a rein he kept upon his emotions, there were times when some trivial thing would arise to make him laugh. Once, for example, he had laughed at a puppy frolicking at the side of the road, with a woman’s high-heeled shoe, of all things, in its mouth. It was the kind of laugh that he preferred others not to see.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks