efil. > efil.'s Quotes

“We didn’t so much exist as much as we haunted, and with no one else to haunt, we haunted each other.”
― Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio

“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
― Percival Everett, James

“And it was so absurd - this father whose silence, for their whole lives, his silence had been a wound Richie thought he might never recover from - it was so absurd for him to be speaking in this way, for him to ask to be spoken to in this way, like they were in some play where fathers and sons said such things to one another.”
― Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings

“But that is the nature of grammar—it is always tense, like an instrument, aching for release, longing to transform present into past into future, is into was into will.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots

“When dreams repeat events from the past, when they mangle them, turn them into images, and sift them through a web of meanings, I start to fear that the past, just like the future, will remain obscure and inscrutable forever. The fact that I have experienced something doesn’t mean I have understood it. Suppose it turned out that something I thought I knew about and had always regarded as fixed and certain might have happened for a completely different reason and in a way I had never suspected. That it had led me to the wrong conclusion, and that I had failed to go in the right direction because I was blind, or asleep.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“Speaking does harm, sows confusion and weakens things that are obvious. Speaking makes me tremble inside. I don't think I have ever said anything really important in my entire life -- there's a lack of words for the most important things anyway. (I must make a list of missing words -- top of it I'll put a verb that means something in between "I sense" and "I see.")”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“Whenever people say “everything,” “always,” “never,” “every,” they’re really only talking about themselves—in the real world such generalities don’t exist.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night