Sisyphus

“His death had been the intruder that day and it had taken the only thing he really valued. It has pissed on his hopes and marked its territory inside his life. He hoped it would come back through the slit and take him now, struggle with him while he hacked at its merciless velocity.”
― Brian Catling, The Erstwhile

“The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“It's like we're all going up a flight of stairs together and at a certain point I say 'this is as far as I go'. And on that step, higher up, they're all happy and I watch them from below. Had he always been like that? It wasn't shyness or reserve or adolescence, as other people thought. He wasn't going to get over it. He could dance when he was alone, he could get emotional in his room with a book, but when the party started he disconnected, the others turned into a movie that he could watch but not participate in. So he acted like he was invisible, which wasn't hard when everyone was drunk. And he withdrew into his room, where he felt the purest kind of relief.”
― Mariana Enríquez, Nuestra parte de noche

“We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike BEFORE that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year