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To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface QUOTES

To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface QUOTES

1 " It began to occur to me that the whole story of love might be nothing more than a wicked lie; that simply sleeping beside another body night after night gives no express right of entry to the interior world of their thoughts or dreams;that we are separate in the end whatever contrary illusions we may cherish; and that this miserable truth might as well be faced, since it will be dinned into one, like it or not by the failings of those we hold dear. I wasn't so bitter now. I'd begun to emerge into a sense of satisfaction with my not, but it would be a long time before I trusted someone, for I'd seen how essentially unknowable even the best loved might prove to be. "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

2 " There are sights too beautiful to swallow. They stay on the rim of the eye; it cannot contain them. "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

3 " A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit. Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads, "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

4 " There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this circling planet. It isn’t part of the deal. "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

5 " Why does the past do this? Why does it linger instead of receding? Why does it return with such a force sometimes that the real place in which one stands or sits or lies, the place in which one's corporeal body most undeniably exists, dissolves as if it were nothing more than a mirage? The past cannot be grasped; it is not possible to return in time, to regather what was lost or carelessly shrugged off, so why these sudden ambushes, these flourishes of memory? "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

6 " A child raised catholic knows the world is not all it seems; knows that other realms exist above the clouds or thousands of miles beneath the floor. Though these beliefs may in their detail be discarded, the sense remains: that the earth is porous; that the eyes are not to be trusted. "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

7 " For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

8 " If you destroy the habitat of a species, if you kill off the food it depends on – milk parsley, in the case of the Swallowtail – then it is done for. William Burroughs had a nice phrase for it. It no longer has the ghost of a chance. Mind "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

9 " In a certain mood, the earth itself can seem a ouija board, calling out its advice, discharging symbol after symbol, relentless and malevolent, though to ordinary eyes nothing more has happened than a single back and white bird winging down the sky. "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

10 " At the foot of one of the pilings there was a single pyramidal orchid the flushed pink of a cat’s tongue. I didn’t know what it boded but it made me smile, growing there unlooked for in the trampled dirt at the base of a bypass. And "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

11 " We crossed this river then and pulled away, and in the empty fields the lark still spilled praise. "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

12 " The art of writing was independently born in these four regions and I do not think it a coincidence that the advent of the written word was nourished by river water. "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

13 " театр образов прячется у него в мозгу: никто, кроме него, никогда не увидит спектакля, и на земле нет медиума, способного точно определить яркость прожекторов или темп действия "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

14 " some things are drawn to water and behave differently when they are near it. "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

15 " 99.9 per cent of the matter of all the human bodies on the planet, all 6 billion of them, takes up no more space than a single sugar cube. The rest is made up of empty space and drifts of electrons, nothing more. "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

16 " I am haunted by waters. It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby "

― Olivia Laing , To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface