Sketchbook

“Kya kare kya na kare yeh kaise mushkil hai?”

“Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.”
—   

Walter Benjamin

“But everything matters. Everything is our lives is who we are.”
—   Penelope Trunk

“Friendship and romance are the realm of anarchy.”
—   Cary Tennis

“Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall your poverty come as one that travels, and your want as an armed man.”
—   Proverbs 6:10-11

“Zonka taught me his newspaper code, which he liked to express as, ‘When you have to march, march.’ This included writing a story you lacked all enthusiasm for, meeting a deadline no matter what hours were necessary, getting an interview after you’d been decisively turned down, not falling in love with your deathless prose, remembering that you were there to write a story and not have a good time.”
—   Roger Ebert

“Building a wedding — the bridal party, the families, the guests, the minister, writing the vows, selecting the food — is like a sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy. You’re trying to make something beautiful out of unruly and unpredictable elements — the weather, the nuttier relatives, rivalries, disorders, dreams. Out of mostly old neurotic family and friends, you hope to create something of beauty, a whole. You create it as an act of faith, that for a brief period of time, the love and commitment of two people will bring everyone together, and it will sort of work. Even if the weather or personalities are worrisome, these breezes and water will flow through the structure of your wedding, will sanctify and change it, and it will hold.”
—   

Anne Lamott

“There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond me. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight. Evenings, after Jake had been put to bed, we quietly ate watercress and translucent noodles that neither of us could find the strength to remove from their cartoons; took turns to doze in the bathtub; and failed to stay awake for the duration of a TV show. Rachael was tired and I was tired. A banal state of affairs, yes — but our problems were banal, the stuff of women’s magazine’s. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.”
—   Netherland, Joseph O’Neill

“Cara’s rapist struck every person who ever loved her. Then he hurt every person who ever loved me. It is stunning how far the grief of rape travels — across generations. Violent acts done to us affect our children not yet born.”
—   Christa Parravani

“

The leopard meets the tortoise on a lonely stretch of road. The leopard has been trying to catch the tortoise for a long time. The tortoise is a trickster, and so obviously has been escaping. And then on this day the leopard finally catches up with him and says, ah-ha. You know, now I’ve got you. Prepare to die.

And tortoise says to leopard: Can I ask you one last favor? And the leopard says, yes, why not? And the tortoise says: Give me a short time to prepare myself for death. And the leopard looked around and said: I don’t see why not. Yes, go ahead. But then instead of standing still and thinking, as the leopard had expected, the tortoise began to dig and scatter sand all over the road, you know, throwing sand in all directions with his hands and feet.

And the leopard says: What’s going on? Why are you doing that? And the tortoise says: I’m doing this because after I am dead, I want anyone passing by this spot and seeing all this sign of struggle on the road to say: A man and his match struggled here.

And the moral of this is the importance of struggle, that we cannot - no one is going to guarantee us the outcome. Nobody’s going to say if you struggle, you will succeed. It would be too simple. But even if we are not sure how it is going to end, what success will attend our enterprise, we still have this obligation to struggle.

”
—   Chinua Achebe