Musings

Sometimes naming a thing – giving it a name, or discovering its name – helps one to begin to understand it.

Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

She had become the sort of person she approved of but she wasn’t sure she had chosen anything she actually wanted.

Sophie Ward, Love and Other Thought Experiments

“Go to Old Delhi, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.

The very same thing is done with humans in this country.”

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

…sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meaning for ourselves…

And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk