Simon Gibson

“When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort. But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams.”
― Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

“Lies the beauty of your walk in the way you walk it … or in the journey’s end?”
― Wytze Keuning, Ashoka the Great

“Sundays, like a stanza break
Or shower's end of all applause,
For some old unexplaining sake
The optimistic tread these shores,
As lonely as the dead awake
Or God among the dinosaurs.”
― Glyn Maxwell, The Boys at Twilight: Poems, 1990-1995

“Language is intrinsically political, as how we talk about something conditions how we think about it,”
― Mark Galeotti, A Short History of Russia: How the World's Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin