madeinthisuniverse

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“Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.”

— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

[madeinthisuniverse]

“Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.”

— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

[madeinthisuniverse]

“I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.”

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

[madeinthisuniverse]

“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”

— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

[madeinthisuniverse]

“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”

— Han Kang, The Vegetarian

[madeinthisuniverse]

“Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.”

— Han Kang, The Vegetarian

[madeinthisuniverse]

“Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface.”

— Han Kang, The Vegetarian

[madeinthisuniverse]

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.”

— Han Kang, The Vegetarian

[madeinthisuniverse]

“Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves - living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.”

— Han Kang, The Vegetarian

[madeinthisuniverse]

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