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“Perhaps there is one specific sentiment, a kind of longing or nostalgia that can warp time strangely. I think sometimes I miss the present more than I miss the past, and perhaps that is a form of time travel.”

“Perhaps all those things can be called echoes of a person, in the sense of repetition and reverberation, but also in the sense that our bodies and minds are physical spaces where traces of those who came before us still live and bounce around… Maybe home is repetition.”

“the new wife rejoicing to see the stick that is used to beat the older wife should remember that it only patiently awaits its next victim.”

One should cultivate one’s own madness as you might need it when the time comes to confront the madness of others.
- Yoruba Proverb

As Mr D is teaching me, the art of cultivating a desire to live includes knowing how to temporarily look away from things that might wipe out your ability to see at all.

‘In a world of hurt, heartbreak is a flower that blooms red and dies and leaves only a scent but the flower was there, to live, to be, to change. The field. Nothing more, nothing less. Not wasted, not wasted. Meant to be a flower. Meant to leave a scent.’

THE PROSE. THE ARCHITECTURE. THE RESTRAINT. And all three working in concert? Phew!!!

“We honor the past by being vigilant in the present”

“…borders were in place to control the flow of poor people, because rich people could glide through any gate, stand on any land.”

Welcome to The Grand Palomas Resort, you parasites.

“It's a shabby-chic surveillance state. She's Mr.
Rogers in Foucault's Panopticon”, aren’t we all earth angel, aren’t we all.

Percy is working through freezing, dissociation, tonic immobility, and all the ways women’s survival gets misread because it doesn’t look sufficiently cinematic.

“In God's absence we pierced our ears and sullied the purity of our flesh and bought crypto and wrote autofiction. We played truth or dare. Never have we ever. We abolished homosexual marriage and then heterosexual marriage and then marriage in general. The nuns, who were of course married to God, filed for divorce. They hired Jewish lawyers.”

I am tickled, let’s see if it lasts.

“There is loss and then there is life destroying calamity. One encounters the limits of what human hearts can endure all too often in the Congo. The land is filled with monsters and the beast that dwells beneath Kasulo is a thousand-headed hydra, mouths agape at the surface waiting for its prey to enter.”

The “green transition” does not abolish extraction; it gives extraction a progressive branding package and asks us to admire the gadget at the end of the chain.

Time was a riddle not meant to be solved, I concluded… I thought to myself that the act of swallowing our bitterness and absorbing one another upon death had increased our wretchedness. I pitied myself. I had inherited the stinking pile of rubbish, the unspoken emotions, everything that had ever been discarded by generations of Hosseinis; their unmetabolized pain was rotting in the ever-widening pits of my void.

The ego! The ego renders us incoherent!

“The revolution is going to be hijacked. Don’t they know history is full of ruptures, haphazard events, and prone to recycling its own evil phenomena?”

I am so tickled by this book I don’t want it to end

Tempted to DNF. Veronica is annoying af 😵‍💫

It wears on the body, to hold open possibility when none can be seen.

HOLY. HELL. This is memoir operating at full voltage.

Need to take a beat between chapters. Some brutal truths work that way.

Hooked me already!