lita’s Reviews > Other Colors: Essays and A Story > Status Update

...when we lack even the basic principles that might help us understand our history, we can only connect with it through allegory.

The imagination - the ability to convey meaning to others - is humanity's greatest power, and for many centuries it has found its truest expression in novels

...we're all going to die one day, whether we read the Thousand and One Nights or not...

A writer's progress will depend on to a large degree on having read good books. But to read well is not to pass one's eyes and one's mind slowly and carefully over a text: it is to immerse oneself utterly in its soul. This is why we fall in love with only a few books in a lifetime.

A city's collective memory is its soul, and its ruins are its most eloquent testimony.

My aim is to forget it, the way we all forget the roads along which we have come...

You come to an understanding, because you're not giving up on each other. You think about each other, and when you're parted you remember each other's smell.

When the world is shimmering with so many signs and curiosities, how can anyone sleep?

To write a novel is to be open to desires, winds, and inspirations, and also to dark recesses of our minds and their moments of mist and stillness.