Dream Count

Why do we remember what we remember? Which reels from our past assert their vivid selves and which remain dim, just out of reach? I remembered some fleeting encounters so clearly that I wondered if the remembering itself was significant.

This is all there is, this fragile breathing in and out. Where have all the years gone, and have I made the most of life? But what is the final measure for making the most of life, and how would I know if I have?

I'm growing old and the world has changed and I have never been truly known.

The point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it. In all these forms of engagement, a kind of purity of purpose must prevail. It cannot be a gimmick, it must at some level be true. Only then can we reach reflection, illumination, and finally, hopefully, epiphany.

There really is no way to prove to someone else the fullness of your own life. Your true experience is the only proof.

They were ironic about liking what they liked for fear of liking what they were not supposed to like. And they were unable to fear admiration and so criticized people they could simply have admired.

They know irony and hyperbole and sass, but self-love is strange to them.

If our daughters don't know how beautiful they are, just as they are, then surely we have failed.

I do like my life. I flail for meaning sometimes, maybe too often, but it is a full life, and a life I own. I have learned this of myself, that I cannot do without people and I cannot do without stretches of sustained isolation. To be alone is not always to be lonely. Sometimes I withdraw for weeks merely to be with myself, and I sink into reading, my life’s great pleasure, and I think, and I enjoy the silence of my own musing.

Why was a novel a metaphor for unrealistic, anyway? Novels had always felt to me truer to what was real.

There is no elixir more potent than the genuine encouragement of a lovely person.

Stories die and recede from collective memory merely for not having been told. Or a single version thrives because other versions are silenced. Imaginative retellings matter. Literature does truly instruct and delight—or at least it can. Literature keeps the faith and tells the story as reminder, as witness, as testament. Stories help us see ourselves and talk about ourselves. As Seamus Heaney writes, citing Neruda on the art of the Dutch Masters, “The world’s reality will not go unremarked.

When my mother died, too soon after my father, my life’s cover was ripped off, leaving behind an unmoored sense of nakedness, a straining and longing to take back time, a desperate addiction to looking away, a terror of acknowledgement, a fear of finality, and, most of all, ceaseless sadness and anger, each sometimes emerging wrapped in the other.

morning, I was hesitant to rise, because to get out of bed was to approach again the possibility of sorrow.

It feels so unbeneficial to pretend to like your life. Would you pretend to yourself or just to the world, and if you pretended to yourself too, then does the pretending become in some way real? And what, anyway, is real?

Nothing beats living in your own country if you can afford the life you want.

I was content, sated. I was where I was supposed to be. Yet in quiet moments, alone, I feared that my contentment was a kind of resignation.

He’s a gesturer, Jide, not a finisher; he starts things or makes to start things and then he stops. It frustrates me that nothing is too intolerable for him to bear, and that he bears it all, so plaintive and passive. You don’t stop at longing; you use the force of your longing to bring into being the life that you want, or you try

We want what we've made to stay long after we're gone. That is how we seek immortality.

She tried a Christian dating site but it felt ghostly, with too few men, and even fewer Black men. The only man she matched with looked like the man in the news who had just killed two women and put them in trash bags

his animation a shield for his incompetence.

He was not made for permanence of any kind, and I felt from the beginning that we were sailing on the surface because there was no option of depth.

They do care about pleasing you, but only so they can say, “Wow, look what I did.” An act of self-praise more than an act of giving.

every woman has a story like this, where a man has lied to her or betrayed her and left her with consequences.

Foreginers go on and on about the challenges of emerging markets, not knowing that the biggest is the hubris of irresponsible men.

She watched the years glide past, and relationships come and go, always thinking: It has to be the next man, it can’t not be the next man. Why did it not happen?

That’s some Ugly American shit right there. It’s not like you haven’t travelled the world.

Europeans and Americans industrialized slavery. They turned people into things, like bits of wood. A piece of wood can never be part of your family. A piece of wood can never be human. In Igboland a slave was still human.

if I had no choice but to stay indoors, then I would oil my thinning edges every day, drink eight tall glasses of water, jog on the treadmill, sleep long, luxurious hours, and pat rich serums on my skin. I would write new travel pieces from old unused notes, and if lockdown lasted long enough, I might finally have the heft I needed for a book.

if my body wasn’t faltering, I would have asked, “Do you feel nothing else? Are the compartments of your heart not roomy enough?