Nada S’J > Recent Status Updates

“To unmake a family home is like breaking a clock. So much time has passed through all the dimensions of that home. Apparently, a fox can hear a clock ticking from forty yards away. There was a clock on the kitchen wall of our family home, less than forty yards from the garden. The foxes must have heard it ticking for over a decade. It was now all packed up, lying face down in a box.”

“He had mentioned, last week, a certain surprise at my actual strength. I said I had been thinking about this, and had wondered if a lot of what looked like strength wasn't just a highly developed capacity to compartmentalize.”

I said I knew she had always thought of me as fragile.

"She does. I would imagine most people do. It's not just your physical fragility, it's the way you relate to people, the closeness of your emotion to the surface - everything about your emotional tone seems fragile. But you're not. You're really extremely strong."

“learning hurts, learning can be very painful, you have to open up things you’d rather forget.”

“But sometimes things happen in our lives that overtake even the most well-constructed defences.”

“I realised that I had a very closely calibrated idea of my physical well-being, very fearful of losing control, that my personality was organised around a certain level of mobilisation or an anxiety.”

“ in other words reader: don’t be a baby.”

“All the same I had come from somewhere else. I missed the smell of plants I could not name, the sound of birds I could not name, the murmur of languages I could not name. Where exactly was southern Africa? One day I would look at a map and find out. That night I lay awake all night long. I had so many questions to ask the world from my bedroom in West Finchley about the country I was born in.”

“I was thinking about the phrase 'out of the blue. It was so thrilling to think about the blue that things came out of. There was a blue, it was big and mysterious, it was like mist or gas and it was like a planet but it was also a human head which is shaped like a planet.”

“ When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it’s a sensation that happens only in the present tense’”

“When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.”

‘ One of the most terrible moments in a boy’s life,’ Paul said, “ is when he discovers his father and " mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It's a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can't evade it.”

I as Frank described “ squeezed my eyelids closed against the tears”

"Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place."

“Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time. I learned that grammar was not an arbitrary, that it served a purpose, that it helped to form the ways we thought, that it could be freeing as well as a restrictive.”

“Pain is a mystery. Who knows why it is visited upon us! We can only bear it.”

“We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”