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“The English-speaking world is not the world. It doesn’t stand in for and is not equal to the world; its literature is not literature, its philosophy is not philosophy. The translations we do read are their own necessary reminder of this – of everything we are not reading, and yet has been written and is being read by so many others, vast populations of other writers and readers, all the time and everywhere else.

I love the little overlaps, you can tell the journalists are reading past reviews of Joni and padding their own.

oil-metabolizing bacteria !

i'm getting what i asked for from Everything is Tuberculosis!

“We must not see any person as an abstraction.
Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets,
with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish,
and with some measure of triumph.

—ELIE WIESEL

“Ultimately, what I needed was not just a tetanus shot but an entire set of robust systems to work perfectly in concert with each other—a phenomenon that ought not be a luxury in our world of abundance, and yet still somehow is.”

“But the market need not be the only determinant of human health. Instead, we could invest more public and philanthropic money into research and development of drugs, vaccines, and treatment distribution systems. We could reimagine the allocation of global healthcare resources to better align them with the burden of global suffering—rewarding treatments that save or improve lives."

“Corruption contributes to Sierra Leone’s poverty, but 1. Government incompetence is not unique to poor countries and 2. While corruption is a significant problem around the world, on a very basic level, Sierra Leone simply does not have enough money to build a functioning healthcare system.

“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”

“ ‘Immigrants are an asset, not a danger,’ D’Alema concludes. And so, too, is the process of cultural métissage (‘hybridization’), which the infl ux of newcomers is bound to trigger; a mixing of cultural inspirations is a source of enrichment and an engine of creativity”

“I wrote: ‘the real benefit of travel is that you encounter the comforting ordinariness of everyone else.”

I always imagined my choice of husband would be like my travel-writing, unusual, but not so much as to alienate my parents. Somebody foreign, with poetry in his soul. Not a successful Igbo engineer who still polished his shoes with kiwi polish that everybody’s father in Nigeria had used. Where did he even buy the tin?”

“If I said he beat me, or he’s not actually divorced, or he is seeing another woman, Aunty Jane would understand. Real meaty reasons, with sympathy poured on me, and opprobrium on him. But she would never understand the truth, that I broke up with Chuka because I could no longer ignore that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.”

“My father was a shrewd and cautious man, but because there was a part of him that dreamed, he knew how to let others dream.”

“Yet New York City often featured in my imagined lives, maybe because it is the city that is supposed to feature in imagined lives. Paris featured too, another city I do not care for. Paris wears its badge of specialness too heavily, and therefore gracelessly;”

putting a tab for every mention of ingrown toenails

taking!! turns!!

In response to a journalist who asked him to "summarize himself in a nutshell," John Cage once said, "Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in." He knew his name was stuck to him, or he was stuck to it. Still, he urges out of it… We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.

Perfect

I’ve literally found my new obsession HOLY

I don’t want any more. I want more.

Five stars off the bat HOLY COW

“But what good is a soul, really?” she muses, as if it’s the first time she’s stopped to wonder. As if it’s not the question that plagued her that first night, that still plagues her after all these years. “It lives in the mind. A piece you cannot see or touch. A prize you are told to shield for a time you cannot know. Easy enough to part with something so abstract when the alternative is freedom.

“But I am happy here,”
You will be happy there
as well,” she said. “Do you know why?”
Because you are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil. And
who knows, perhaps you will meet a worthy gardener.”
“And barring that,” she went on, “think of all the stories you’ll have to tell
when you get back. After all, there is no art without life to inspire it.”