6 Quotes by Ben Ehrenreich

How painful and absurd, this fantasy that your ownlabors might in turn be redeemed by strangers centuries and perhaps continents away who would need to hear what you had to whisper, this delusion that you were doing anything other than babbling because you like the sounds it makes, like a child blowing bubbles into milk.

Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss.

Unanimity makes me itchy. It almost always hides a grave. I started digging.

We do not know what is being done in our name. Worse, we do not ask.

Memory,′ wrote the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, is a process of organizing what to forget.

We have no choice but to scramble to retrace our steps and to try, in a hurry now, to imagine things differently: other worlds, other ways of thinking, living, seeing. Other ways of writing, and of reading.