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1 " Then she reached for her bag and took out a small book. She explained she had found it at a store near her home, and that it described the nature of your character based on the date of your birth. (...) I thought some of it was true and some of it was not, but the real truth was how such things allowed someone to talk about you, or what you had done or why you did it, in a way that unraveled your character into distinct traits. It made you seem readable to them, or to yourself, which could feel like a revelation. "
― Jessica Au , Cold Enough for Snow
2 " She made no attempt to hide her grief, which must have been her father’s grief also, and this surprised me, that she would not try and mask it somehow, that she was not ashamed of the drama, as my family would have been, but inhabit it with rage and sadness, as if it were the cloak of some great animal that she had just slain. "
3 " As we walked, she asked me about my work. I didn't answer at first, and then I said that in many old paintings, one could discover what was called a pentimento, an earlier layer of something that the artist had chosen to paint over. Sometimes, these were as small as an object, or a color that had been changed, but other times, they could be as significant as a whole figure, an animal, or a piece of furniture. I said that in this way too, writing was just like a painting. It was the only way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read. "
4 " we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting. "
5 " Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain. The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, suffering, until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere. "
6 " I thought of my mother, and how some day, in the future, I would go with my sister to her apartment, the one I had never seen, with the single task of sorting through a lifetime of possessions, packing everything away. I thought of all the things I would find there—private things like jewelry, photo albums and letters, but also signs of a careful and well-organized life: bills and receipts, phone numbers, an address book, the manual for the washing machine and dryer. In the bathroom, there would be half-used glass vials and jars of creams, signs of her daily rituals that she did not like anyone else to see. My sister, I knew, ever methodical, would suggest we sort things into piles: things to keep, things to donate, things to put in the trash. I would agree but, in the end, I knew I would keep nothing, whether out of too much, or too little sentiment, I did not know. "
7 " She had kept, I knew, all the tickets, brochures and guides we had been given to take home, as if she would take them out later to read as one reads a novel. "
8 " I asked my mother what she believed about the soul and she thought for a moment. Then, looking not at me but at the hard, white light before us, she said that she believed that we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting. When she was growing up, she said that she had never thought of herself in isolation, but rather as inextricably linked to others. Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain. "
