Yorgos Nastos

“He has this feeling, with women, that it’s hard to have an experience that feels entirely new, that doesn’t feel like something that has already happened, and will probably happen again in some very similar way, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake. There’s often this feeling of—Yes, I like you, but I like other people as well. It’s not even that I like them more. It’s just that I don’t like them less. So to be with any one person feels like an arbitrary thing, and that arbitrary feeling has started to undermine any lingering sense that there might be a particular person that he’s somehow meant to be with.”
― David Szalay, Flesh

“Any event that surprises a man has already been experienced by other men before him. The effects of all human possibilities have already been felt. Nothing that might happen to us here, as terrible or as felicitous as it might seem, is new. But what we experience is always new because every man is unique, the way every leaf and every tree is unique. Men share with each other the same lifeblood, but each feeds himself from it differently. Even if the new isn’t really new, it’s always new for those who, ceaselessly, wash up on the world’s shores, generation after generation, wave after wave. So, in order to find yourself in life, to not lose yourself on the path, you must listen to the voice of duty. To think too much about yourself is to falter. Whoever understands this secret has the potential to live in peace. But it’s easier said than done.”
― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black

“It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“I sometimes went with Svetlana to Pilates—even though the logistics of mat placement was deeply stressful, in a way that made me feel like I understood the primal conflicts for land that formed the basis of modern history. The room had a maximum occupancy of thirty, which might have been OK if everyone was just sitting there, but not if the idea was to make your body as long as possible and do sweeping motions with your limbs. Svetlana always made us get there early, to secure an advantageous position. Then the people who came later would try to crowd us out, inserting themselves between us, or directly in front of us, blocking our view—not apologetically, but with a self-righteous attitude. If you didn’t defend your space like Svetlana did, sitting up extra straight and doing elaborate stretches, you got hemmed in and couldn’t do the movements. People kept hitting you (or were you hitting them?) and giving you dirty looks.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or