Ann

“When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later … later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“and she found things in her memory that she hadn’t been fully aware of, things that had lain unexamined and unfelt inside of her for all these years.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“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

“don’t worry, work, and have faith that all answers will be found there.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain