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“Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee” - Albert Camus

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“There is also a cultural and societal claim however, in which the woman is not only established as a birth-giving being but also as a creative maker of things, an artist in her own right.” - Chris Dercon on Rei Naito’s Matrix: inside the visible

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“詩是無形的畫，畫是有形詩”

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“Ramy gesticulated wildly as he spoke. It was clear he wasn’t truly angry, just passionate and clearly brilliant, so invested in the truth he needed the whole world to know.” - Babel, Rebecca F. Kuang

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"It happens all the time in heaven, And some day

It will begin to happen Again on earth -

That men and women who are married, And men and men who are Lovers,

And women and women Who give each other Light,

Often get down on their knees

And while so tenderly Holding their lovers hand,

With tears in their eyes Will sincerely speak, saying,

My dear, How can I be more loving to you;

How can I be more kind?"

Hafez Iran/Persia 1320 - 1389

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"Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It's too high! Come to the edge! And they came, and he pushed, And they flew."

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"太早就知道自己是隻天生麗質的孔雀，難自棄，再如何懶惰都要常常梳刷羽毛。因為擁有炫麗的羽毛，經常忍不住要去照眾人這面鏡子，難以自拔沉迷於孔雀的交際舞，就是這麼回事，這是基本壞癖之一。　　但，卻是個沒有活生生眾人的世界。咱們”“說，要訓練自己建造出自給自足的封閉系統，要習慣「所謂的世界就是個人」這麼樣奇怪知覺的我，要在別人所謂的世界面前做淋漓盡致的演出。　　因為時間在，要用無聊跑過去." - 鳄鱼手记, 邱妙津

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“counting the notes in the waltz of the clock. Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia for dreams, tried all kinds of methods of exhausting themselves. They would gather together to converse endlessly, to tell over and over for hours on end the same jokes, to complicate to the limits of exasperation the story about the capon, which was an endless game in which the narrator asked if they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they answered yes, the narrator would say that he had not asked them to say yes, but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they answered no, the narrator told them that he had not asked them to say no, but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they remained silent the narrator told them that he had not asked them to remain silent but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and no one could leave because the narrator would say that he had not asked them to leave but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and so on and on in a vicious circle that lasted entire nights.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One hundred years of solitude

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“Protected by the delightful cover of collective disorder, Jose Arcadio and Pilar passed many relaxing hours. They were two happy lovers among the crowd, and they even came to suspect that love could be a feeling that was more relaxing and deep than the happiness, wild but momentary, of their secret nights.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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“Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other business men, in a way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.” - Down and out in Paris and London, George Orwell

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“He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve. Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.” - Down and out in Paris and London, George Orwell

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“It is the mark of an educated person to search for the same kind of clarity in each topic to the extent that the nature of the matter accepts it.” - Aristotle

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“The outcome is what is euphemistically called mass culture, and it’s deep-rooted trouble is a universal unhappiness, due on one side to the troubled balance between laboring and consumption and, on the other, to the persistent demands of the animal laborans to obtain a happiness which can be achieved only where life’s processes of exhaustion and regeneration, of pain and release from pain, strike a perfect balance.” - Hannah Arendt

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Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket

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"All life is an experiment. But at the end of our lives we'd know that no man could do with our lives as he pleased except ourselves, and our triumphs and mistakes alike were our own." - The Paper Menagerie, Ken liu

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"The angle at which the flower was tilted struck me as very beautiful." - The paper menagerie, Ken Liu

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"Judging was the luxury of those who did not need to survive" - The Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu