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Quote by Núria Bendicho Giró

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Terres mortes

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Núria Bendicho Giró

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“Whenever he contemplated death, he felt he would miss thinking most of all. There was a delicate pleasure of thought and sensation. The awareness of it. The inner voice of thoughtless reasoning, effortless analyzing, ceaseless tingling. It was the only thing a person had if everything were taken away from them. It was what continued to exist before they touched any object or heard any sound once awaken from slumber. That personal conversation was irreplaceable. Andrei would be upset at death, whenever it came, because of what it entailed: no longer being able to look down and see one’s hands. No longer being able to feel a breathing belly. No longer able to wonder, or to remember a memory. It surprised him, in such a stupid, sad way, that there was no save button in life. Yes, yes, we die, I get it, he thought, but for some reason, he’d pathetically assumed he could take something with him. That death would be okay because at least he would still be able to reflect. In theory, he would die and get to say, “Whew, I died. Now let’s think about it.” But he wouldn’t. All the memories he had earned would wash away instantly. The work done on oneself could not be transferred. He would not trim his fingernails or have the chance to check out another woman’s ass ever again. Death was flat. Aliveness had texture.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“This living organism breathed, could roam around the world, see and be seen, and make any mess it wanted. And here Andrei was, pulsing in a field with another pulse. How miraculous that for a short period, the two of them could focus their eyes, turn their heads, lift their limbs, and run straight into the arms of another person. The living were not rocks or wood, incapable of being affected by chance, but rather forces of momentary magic that could digress and collide with anything it chose. Should a human ever feel bored lying atop their bed, they could change reality and within thirty seconds walk outside and strike up a new conversation with another pulse on the street. The living sound an ancient, sacred, temporary hum that is exclusive to them. Once gone, it can never be retrieved. But if there still, it could do anything.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“He looked at these prayer candles quite indifferently, and feeling an impulse to shape his lips into an ‘O’ and release some air, Andrei blew the entire table out. Once he’d finished, large clouds of slow smoke spiraled into the dark air, for a moment appearing like fossils, and then rose into oblivion. But oblivion was not beautiful. It met him with dread. Andrei could hear the whispers of desperate folks who lighted their single candle to pray for relief. He heard screams for help, answers begged for, and pleas for private miracles. He’d slaughtered every single prayer. “Where do their lights all go—now that I’ve done that?” asked the panicked boy.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“Andrei perched on the rooftop of the cinema and looked out at Westwood’s nightlife bustling before him. He was mounted on the single, cream, stoned gargoyle built above in the corner of the theatre. He and his gothic animal breathed under the cold moon. Yes. He always felt like the moon—generally unnoticed by the world, that never minds—and navigated richly through his life alone and uninterrupted, like a ghost. Truth is an unobvious color. Those who attempt truth will never make billboards or conversations but usually sift in the background in awkward veritas.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“Sometimes in the winter in the dark I'd wake and everything that smacked of dread would have lifted up and stolen away in the night and I would just be lying there with the snow blowing against the glass. I'd think that maybe I should turn on the lamp but then I'd just lie there and listen to the quiet. The wind in the quiet. There are times now when I see those patients in their soiled nightshirts lying on gurneys in the hallway with their faces to the wall that I ask myself what humanity means. I would ask does it include me.”

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Book:Stella Maris
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“We have long known that in closed societies, the the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be "complex and frightening," as [Karen] Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent. The noise of argument, the constant hum of disagreement--these can irritate people who prefer to live in a society tied together by a single narrative. The strong preference for unity, at least among a portion of the population, helps explain why numerous liberal or democratic revolutions, from 1789 onward, ended in dictatorships that enjoyed wide support. Isaiah Berlin once wrote of the human need to believe that "somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science... there is a final solution." Berlin observed that not all of the things that human beings think are good or desirable are compatible. Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group--all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people: "to admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera." Nevertheless, unity is a chimera that some will always pursue.”

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Book:Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
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