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by Esther Yi

They wanted to make the world a better place, and that began with my enlarged pores.

“Keep your eyes fixed on a single point in the horizon. Don’t look anywhere else. If a truck is about to crash into you, ignore it. If a plane is falling out of the sky, ignore it. Look straight ahead and squeeze the power. Do not change course. The world will change for you. You are at the center of the universe. You can’t make a single wrong move.”

“No,” O said. “The pictures deign to be made by me. That’s how desperate they are to exist.”

When I paint, I am saying yes to something that can be neither agreed nor disagreed with.”

“Have you been reading as if your life depends on it?” she liked to ask the boys. “Have you been reading as if every single sentence could be true? So that as soon as you build an affinity for the ideas of one book, another book comes along with ideas of its own, and as soon as you think it’s one versus the other, dozens of other books appear, parts of some aligning with parts of others, sowing confusion in your soul? Have you been reading until you feel sick on everything you know?”

But we must see our miserable experiences through to the end.”