Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

“I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I can’t stop them. They leave me, and I love them more.”“

“there are no observers; only participants.”

“Above all, I wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet’s atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.”

“As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.”

“The Anthropocene is a proposed term for the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. Nothing is more human than aggrandizing humans, but we are a hugely powerful force on Earth in the twenty-first century.”

“I did not get labyrinthitis because the universe wanted to teach me a lesson about balance. So I tried to live with it as well as I could”

“The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era. Making conclusions about a book’s quality from a 175-word review is hard work for artificial intelligences, whereas star ratings are ideal for them.”

"as if Passer, with his indomitable vitality and optimism, was trying to stick his head out."

"Since Jan defines the border for himself as the maximum acceptable dose of repetitions, I am obliged to correct him: the border is not a product of repetition. Repetition is only one of the ways of making the border visible. The borderline is covered with dust, and repetition is like a hand whisking away dust."

"It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense."

"Yes, when you cross the border, laughter fatefully rings out. But what if you go still farther, go beyond laughter?"

"Jan had never shared Passer’s admiration for things changing, but he liked his desire for change, seeing it as mankind’s oldest desire, humanity’s most conservative conservatism."

"As he said that, his fist pounded the table and his eyes gleamed. His enthusiastic account of the hopes of the body was a melancholy echo of his account of the hopes of humanity. Both enthusiasms were equally illusory, and Passer’s gleaming eyes shed an equally magical light on both."

"When Jan long ago first met him, Passer had spoken about humanity’s great hopes, pounding the table with his fist as his huge eyes gleamed with endless enthusiasm. Now he spoke not about the hopes of humanity but about the hopes of his body. The doctors maintained that if he got through the next two weeks of intensive injections and great pain, he would beat the disease."

"Laughter was there like an enormous trap waiting patiently in the room, hidden behind a thin, invisible partition. Only a few millimeters separated physical love from laughter, and he dreaded crossing over them. Only a few millimeters separated him from the other side of the border, where things no longer have meaning."

"Edwige replied that she never said “No.” Why say something she didn’t mean? “‘When a woman says “No,” she really means “Yes.”’ That male aphorism has always outraged me. It’s as stupid as all human history.”"

"But this time his gesture had no effect. His own gaze was much weaker than the gaze he felt on him, the dubious gaze of the board of examiners, which knew full well that he was repeating himself and informed him that all repetition was mere imitation and all imitation was worthless."

"It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything—love, convictions, faith, history—no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter."

"The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her “I want to live” was spun from the threads of a spiderweb."

"They were the worst words possible, because they were situated outside the debate conducted by the spirit of the time. They were words beyond good and evil, perfectly incongruous words."

"The best progressive ideas are those that include a strong enough dose of provocation to make its supporters feel proud of being original, but at the same time attract so many adherents that the risk of being an isolated exception is immediately averted by the noisy approval of a triumphant crowd."

"She lived in exemplary harmony with herself."

"And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man’s cities by the blackbird.All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important & what is not,& so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important,while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla war,which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise."

"Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into their artificial, unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet."

"From the planet’s viewpoint, the blackbird’s invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. "

"That hollowness in her stomach is exactly that unbearable absence of weight. And just as an extreme can at any moment turn into its opposite, so lightness brought to its maximum becomes the terrifying weight of lightness, and Tamina knows she cannot bear it for another moment. She turns around and starts to run."

"The Idiot of Music finished his song, and the President of Forgetting spread his arms and shouted: “Children, ‘living is being happy!’”"

"For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles."

"It is Tamina who is filled with bitter hatred, not the children. Their desire to hurt is positive and cheerful, a desire that can rightly be called joy. They want to hurt anyone beyond their world’s border only in order to exalt their own world and its law."

"Her misfortune is not that the children are bad but that she is beyond their world’s border. Humans do not revolt against the killing of calves in slaughterhouses. Calves are outside human law, just as Tamina is outside the children’s law."