From A Long and Speaking Silence, by Nghi Vo:
The problem was that Chih [cared]. So did Singing Hills, where the archives were punctuated with long, speaking silences, months and years lost to exile or accident or sabotage. Chih felt the shape of the silence they had caused with their carelessness, and they swiped hard at their eyes.
From “Interminable Ignorance,” by Robert Pogue Harrison, for The New York Review of Books:
In the twenty-first century we know too much about the relativity of even the most absolute values, too much about the sheer indifference of the universe, and too much about the contingent, altogether improbable origins of life on Earth to will into being illusions that would shield us from what our will to truth has already revealed. Knowledge in our day and age can at most be willfully ignored.
From Catch-22, by Joseph Heller:
The only thing going on was a war, and no one seemed to notice but Yossarian and Dunbar. And when Yossarian tried to remind people, they drew away from him and thought he was crazy.
From Waiting on a Friend, by Natalie Adler:
How horribly does a guy have to die that his ghost keeps on suffering even after he leaves his sick body behind?
From “My Message for the Class of 2026,” by Sharon McMahon:
Durable hope is not the belief that everything will work out. Durable hope is the decision to keep working when you don’t yet know how things will turn out, when the outcome is not yet assured. Durable hope doesn’t ask you not to pretend the wounds of the world are not real. Durable hope looks directly at what is broken and says: “I will not let this be the whole story.
