Kathy Yang

“On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“How we squander our sorrows, gazing beyond them
into the sad wastes of duration,
to see if maybe they have a limit.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory