Protima > Recent Status Updates

“Once again, I arrived at my usual conclusion: one must educate oneself.”

“I had suddenly become ‘a married woman.’ I had conformed to society, while I had always wanted to remain in the margins.”

“The breakfast that my mother had prepared just like she used to, the melancholy atmosphere of the beginning of autumn, my uniform… everything reminded me of the beginning of school.”

“…we can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable… once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.”

“When you see your parents rarely, all is forgiven.”

“If I wasn’t comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.”

“The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else’s rules.”

“Our country has always known war and martyrs. So, like my father said: ‘When a big wave comes lower your head and let it pass.’” That’s very Persian, the philosophy of resignation.

“I wanted to be justice, love and the wrath of god all in one.”

“I am the last prophet.” “A woman?”

“Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die”

“The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”

“It was really darling.” “It sounds darling.”

“Maybe it’s true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous.”

“You had to crave something to be dishonest.”

“It’s hard to give people things—I guess it’s harder to be given things, though.”

“She felt hurt that he had agreed so easily, and she laughed sourly at herself that she could ask a thing and be hurt when she got it.”

“I’m my own. I don’t have to be you.”

“And once a boy has suffered rejection, he will find rejection even where it does not exist—or, worse, will draw it forth from people simply by expecting it.”

“In their millions the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears’ function to do this just as it is the eyes’ business to make stars twinkle.”

“I don’t want them to be sad. I hope I’m not so small-souled as to take satisfaction in being missed.”

“And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”

“Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have […] A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil?”

“Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally? […] It’s one of the great fallacies that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.”

“And memory.”

“Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us.”

“It’s the lie I’m thinking of. It might infect everything. If they ever found out you’d lied to them about this, the true things would suffer. They wouldn’t believe anything then.”

“It was not laziness if he was a rich man. Only the poor were lazy. Just as only the poor were ignorant. A rich man who didn’t know anything was spoiled or independent.”

“The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. […] The human is the only guilty animal.”

“…a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.”

“And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden.”