Jack Lin

“There were no colors. Everything was neutral. From this I know that hell is not black or fiery. It is an unvaried gray without promise.”
― Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God

“Perhaps we are experiencing a reverse incarnation. A process where the spirit of the divine becomes lost in human physical nature. Perhaps the spark of divinity, which we experience as consciousness, is being reabsorbed into the boundless creativity of seething opportunistic life. A great wish courses through me. I am curious with desire. I want to see past my lifetime, past yours, into exactly what the paleontologist says will not exist: the narrative. I want to see the story. More than anything, I am frustrated by the fact that I’ll never know how things turn out.”
― Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God

“She turns to glance at me over her shoulder and I see that she has her capable face on, the face she wore on my two emergency-room visits, the face of packing the car for a vacation, the face I saw during Glen’s idiotic affair, the face of Thanksgiving dinner preparations for thirty people and the face of teacher’s conferences. It is the face that got me into college and the face that got Glen out of jail after many an arrest during protests. The face of I’ll take care of it. The face of failure is not an option.”
― Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God

“Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren't involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy? It's precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive--or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running