Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost

« Growing up, I read a lot. Partly because I loved it, and partly because there wasn’t much else to do as a teenage girl in Aligarh. Given the tacit boundaries of my conservatively liberal Muslim family, the world outside my door was as distant as a faraway continent. I ventured into it like a tourist. To school, family outings to the cinema, a few social events with friends. All of these expeditions were monitored and supervised. Crucially, they all required reasons – a sanctioned purpose that permitted my presence on the streets, which could never be aimless. My male cousins roamed the thoroughfares of Aligarh freely, spending late nights at buzzy tea shops, leaping over walls, gazing at the stars. I cultivated a fluency in occupying interiors. Reading, then, was a path into possibilities; it offered a parallel terrain which I could stride through boldly. »

« Books were thus my private continent, providing both excitement and safety. They were my maps to navigating the world, and also the way I created a sense of belonging, of being at home. They opened up worlds for me, without my leaving the house. »

Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, Taran N. Khan

« A man called Isaac nodded and invited us in. A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall where a spiraling basilica of shadows was pierced by shafts of light from a high glass dome above us. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive, woven with tunnels, steps, platforms and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked. ‘Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.’ »

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

i don't pay attention to the world ending. it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.

― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

« Why do we travel? Why do we put ourselves through all the discomfort that moving across great distances and staying in faraway, foreign lands usually entails? My theory is that nature has equipped us with deceitful, flawed memories. That is why we forever set off on new adventures. Once we are home again, the discomfort transforms itself into amusing anecdotes, or is forgotten. Memory is not linear, it is more like a diagram full of points – high points – and the rest is empty. Memory is also abstract. Seen from the future, past discomfort seems almost unreal, like a dream. »

Erika Fatland, Sovietistan

“I undressed and left my clothes on the sand. I was not at ease with my body, not even in the darkness of night. It had been unloved, perhaps forever. Untouched by a lover for a long time. I didn’t know what to do with it when it was not in conversation with a piano. Or how to respond to the way Tomas gazed at the green jewel pierced through my belly button.”

— Deborah Levy, August Blue

« Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

And dance me to the end of love »

Leonard Cohen, Dance Me to the End of Love

« Archaeology can impact in concrete and beneficial ways to bring about reconciliation and acceptance, rather than simply being the raw material for hostility. »

Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the East, by Lynn Meskell

This is the benchmark against which we should start judging how we do archaeology and how we use it in our modern times.

« What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extraordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep on going up! Behind the event there has to be a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or historical upheavals, social unrest, political scandals. »

Georges Perec, “Approaches to What?” In L’Infra-ordinaire

Christine Lai, Landscapes

Maria Popova, We Are the Music, We Are the Spark: Pioneering Biologist Ernest Everett Just on What Makes Life Alive