Ayda

“Tsukuru nodded. Coming up with witty sayings about life seemed, after all, to be a trait shared by all Finns. The long winters might have something to do with it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“The Names, in fact, is a study in American ignorance; then as now, few Americans knew the difference between Sunni and Shiite, or how to pronounce Iran (“E-ron”). DeLillo’s protagonist, Axton, is a risk analyst for an insurance company that counsels multinational corporations on pressing questions about the world. Which country is risky? Where will the next bomb go off? Who creates the risk? Axton is also, as my Turkish friends liked to imagine I was, an unwitting agent for the CIA, the spy who doesn’t know he’s a spy. “Are they killing Americans?” is his main question. Axton and the Americans abroad can’t make sense of the world, can’t grab onto anything. They are not so much arrogant as confused. They perceive their vulnerability, their noses wrinkling at smells in the air: “Wasn’t there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming?” A Greek man named Eliades, with the aspect of a grumpy sage, says to the Americans: I think it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. I will tell you. The whole world takes an interest in this curious way Americans educate themselves.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“You are one of those courageous people who want to dare to live; and to do so believe you have to explore the depths of yourself, undistracted and unprotected by social conventions and norms.”
― Sara Maitland, How to Be Alone

“Pain is what gives rise to meditation. It has nothing to do with age, let alone beards.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage