quotation – Page 7 – secretive dreams

It’s your job to make the reader feel the desperation.

Robert Caro

Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

I do not understand that reference therefore it also is of no importance.

Korob, Star Trek (the original series), S2 E7 Catspaw

It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

I’ve never loved. I’ve never really lived.

Sister Mary, The Young Pope

Almost. It’s a big word for me. I feel it everywhere. Almost home. Almost happy. Almost changed. Almost, but not quite. Not yet. Soon, maybe.

Joan Bauer (via aurelle)

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

But the truth is, I really believe that the biography, among people like us coming from a postcolonial world, is constitutive of intellectual discourse. This is so for the simple reason that we are making discoveries by placing the body in a place where discovery is really possible. One will not find in textbooks the experiences that one has undergone. This is so true—I would never have discovered what it means to be a Latin American solely from textbooks. Quite the contrary: It was sitting in European classrooms that made me feel like a barbarian from the Third World. And it is precisely when I put myself in the middle of the Palestinians and Arabs in Israel that I came to realize that the Middle East is very different from any place I had previously read about in any textbook. I needed the life experiences of all those coming from the peripheral or colonial worlds, or the so called Third World. Life and work cannot be separated. That is, we are constantly in an inventive living situation insofar as we have to think about many things for the first time. And this will be found not in the textbooks of our libraries but in the daily and historical experiences of our lives. The author’s biography is constitutive of his text. It is not pure context. It is, rather, the very meaning of its text.

Enrique Dussel

Ethics Is the Original Philosophy; or, The Barbarian Words Coming from the Third World: An Interview with Enrique Dussel (Translated by Fernando Gomez

(via gravalicious)

But there’s no room at all for free spirits in modern academia, with its speech codes and humorless moralizing. So she makes two lives for herself, or three for all we know, or four, and in the end there’s no satisfaction in being multiple Solange St. Croixs instead of one.

Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell