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Quote by Michael Tobert

“His world closes in. The sky is endless no longer but pieced into squares of brick and bright cloths hanging down to dry. Underfoot, no longer stone but rubble, earth, the peelings and rotted scraps of the inedible. He smells the smoke of cooking fires, he hears men arguing and babies screaming like seagulls, he sees young women looking shyly down from high windows, exchanging glances. Now, he is no longer the watcher. Watched. Shouts echo in the dark between twisted walls and back alleys. A twisted smile in a doorway. A stranger’s voice. A stranger’s language.”

Quote by Michael Tobert

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Karna's Wheel

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Michael Tobert

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“She asked me "what is it about these people - the silent ones, the thinking ones, and the brooding ones why do I get drawn to them without knowing them? what is it about them? is there a magnetic force about them? or do they cast a spell on me? what is it about these people! the misfits the poets, the writers, the painters, the singers, the dancers, the musicians, and all the ones who create art? what is it that pulls me to them? is it their craft their passion their words their thoughts their loneliness. their life? what is it about these people?" And I smiled and said "I will search the answers to your questions in my loneliness.”

“And the complete truth of this statement shocks me, because I am mostly on my own. I am so permanently alone that I can feel it in my bones, in my eyeballs, in the roots of my hair. I feel loneliness like a physical presence, as if someone heavy is sitting on my chest. I feel it when I wake up and I feel it when I walk down the street. I feel it when I eat and when I dance; I feel it when I'm with people, and I feel it when I'm not. I feel loneliness inside me, all of the time, but I also like to be alone and I don't really like other humans much either, so where the hell does that leave me?”

“From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alone or of mountains and rivers and deer and cats were left intact. Three albums rendered into a revised past. It was as if I'd been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone.”