Alejandra

Sophrosyne | Ostraneine | Saudade

[ommommommo]

Tuve la sensación de que dios no vivía en el cielo, como me habían enseñado siempre. Para qué alzaba los ojos hacia las nubes pensando en dios y en cómo rezarle, qué desperdicio de fuerzas y de ojos, carajo, si era más simple mirar hacia la selva y recitar un padrenuestro, dos avemarías y un salve a dios, que no estaba arriba, sino abajo, entre los árboles.

Elaine Vilar Madruga, El cielo de la selva

[ommommommo]

Dice Santa que no hay dios aquí, pero ella se equivoca, hay un dios en todas partes, solo que a veces no es bueno y otras veces es sordo, y en ocasiones la selva es tan enorme que los rezos no flotan lo suficientemente arriba ni llegal al cielo. A dios hay que ablandarle los oídos con padrenuestros. Hay que hacerles señales de humo para que baje los ojos y se dé cuenta de que aquí estamos.

Elaine Vilar Madruga, El cielo de la selva

[ommommommo]

“Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past. What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?... What is a country, but a life sentence?”

Ocean Vuong, On earth we're briefly gorgeous

[ommommommo]

“Have you ever made a scene,” you said, filling in a Thomas Kinkade house, “and then put yourself inside it? Have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape, away from you?” How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two different pages, merging?”

Ocean Vuong, On earth we're briefly gorgeous

[ommommommo]

Nadie que no sea puta puede entender la hermandad de las mujeres que viven del sudor de sus coños y es mejor así. Si existiera un mundo de putas, pues entonces tal vez sería un mejor mundo, y eso a nadie le conviene. Ni a los narcos, ni a los militares, ni a las viejas roñosas que se persignan, ni a los morbosos que se levantan cada mañana a contemplar cadaveres, ni a los policías sin respuestas. A las putas les sobran el corazón, las tetas y el coño, y el valor para vender todo eso al postor más hábil. Tanto les sobra todo que lo van a dar por ahí a quien lo necesite, y no lo hacen en un acto de contrición o de miseria, sino que cobran: democráticamente, a pobres y ricos por igual, porque en este mundo es ley que nada es gratis, y un cuerpo y su ilusión deberían pagarse con la vida. No hay dinero en este mundo que pueda en realidad comprar la ilusión que inspira un cuerpo.

Elaine Vilar Madruga, El cielo de la selva, p. 78

[ommommommo]

“In the story, when a girl and her grandmother spot a storm brewing on the green horizon, instead of shuttering the windows or nailing boards on the doors, they set out to bake a cake. I was unmoored by this act, its precarious yet bold refusal of common sense. As Mrs. Callahan stood behind me, her mouth at my ear, I was pulled deeper into the current of language. The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words. To bake a cake in the eye of the storm; to feed yourself sugar in the cusp of danger”.

Ocean Vuong

[ommommommo]

“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey... It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.”

Ocean Vuong

[ommommommo]

“To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.

I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. Perhaps there is a monstrous origin to it, after all. Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war. To say possessing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart’s task of saying yes yes yes to the body.

You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you. Which is why I have taken god’s loneliest creation and put you inside it.

Look.”

Ocean Vuong

[ommommommo]

“If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.”

Ocean Vuong

[ommommommo]

“Buddha was pointing out that the fixed idea that we have about ourselves as solid and separate from each other is painfully limiting. It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem for us… Self-importance hurts us, limiting us to the narrow world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up never satisfied.”

The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron

[ommommommo]

“The second of the three lords of materialism is the lord of speech. This lord represents how we use beliefs of all kinds to give us the illusion of certainty about the nature of reality... The problem isn’t with the beliefs themselves but with how we use them to get ground under our feet, how we use them to feel right and to make someone else wrong, how we use them to avoid feeling the uneasiness of not knowing what is going on. ”

The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron

[ommommommo]

“Chitta means “mind” and also “heart” or “attitude.” Bodhi means “awake,” “enlightened,” or “completely open.” Sometimes the completely open heart and mind of bodhichitta is called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love… This sense of deep connection, of belonging to the same family, is bodhichitta”

The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron

[soberscientistlife]

[ommommommo]

'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.

Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own

[ommommommo]

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?

Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own

[ommommommo]

It is she—shady and amorous as she was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you to-night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own

[ommommommo]

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own