Mark

“A boat beneath a sunny sky, Lingering onward dreamily In an evening of July – Children three that nestle near, Eager eye and willing ear, Pleased a simple tale to hear – Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die: Autumn frosts have slain July. As a child, I don’t understand exactly what it is about. I can’t read the significance of Alice reaching the final square and becoming a queen. But I feel the sadness in the poem, and, in this later now, I know why. It’s because everything is in the present tense, even though it cannot all be; either some of it has passed, or some of it hasn’t happened yet. The sky is sunny, but it has paled. The boat is lingering, but it is gone. It’s July, but it’s autumn. This is a riddle, a paradox. Lewis Carroll must be either looking back into the past, feeling the sunshine and the drifting boat as if he were still there . . . or looking forward from the present, imagining a time when the sky and the boat and the summer will have vanished. Which is it? Doesn’t matter. Wherever he stands, he feels both at once. The current, the retrospective, the projected, all are written in the present tense because they are all, always, mixed up together. Because, even as something is happening, it is gone. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? Where is the boat? Where is the summer? Where are the children?”
― Victoria Coren, For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker

“Gloria Anzaldúa, who revolutionised the Chicana writing of her generation, called the border ‘una herida abierta – an open wound – where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. And before a scab forms, it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two countries merging to form a third country – a border culture.”
― Ed Vulliamy, Amexica: War Along the Borderline

“could tell that one of the Russian proverbs he loved was on the way. ‘The only place with free cheese is a mousetrap”
― A.D. Miller

“When they finally went home, they left behind an unstable, unhappy part of the world, with borders like wounds scored across it.”
― Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain