Steve Middendorf

“I light a cigarette to put off the journey till later / To put off all journeys till later / To put off the entire universe till later.” The entire universe is in a bookcase, no need to go out: what’s the point of leaving the Tower, said Hölderlin, the end of the world has already taken place, no reason to go experience it yourself; you linger, your fingernail between two pages (so soft, so creamy) where Álvaro de Campos, the engineer dandy, becomes more real than Pessoa, his flesh-and-blood double. Great are the deserts and everything is desert.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“kidnappers generally roamed the coast, and in the rainy, grey dusk they would stun a freed man in the street and drag him half-conscious onto a ship bound for the Southern states, to make of him a slave again. This was not the only hazard, though it was the worst of them. White men were everywhere aggrieved, and they would sometimes rise up against us black devils, the miserable black scourge who would destroy their livelihood by labouring at cheaper rates.”
― Esi Edugyan, Washington Black

“Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Or are they given? Are they automatic, like an assumption? Self-renewing? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in the place or to those who leave and come back to it? Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return?”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Passions, deaths, storms, etc., give us great pleasure in spite of their ugliness for the simple reason that they are well imitated, and if what Parini says in his Oration on poetry1 is true, this is because man hates nothing more than he does boredom, and therefore he enjoys seeing something new, however ugly.”
― Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone