Ann

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence.”
― Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch: A novel

“He used his delicate sorrows as a battering ram, smashing his way into people’s hearts, where he could reside until he was bored, taking what he wanted.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island