29 Quotes by Sondra Charbadze

I know now that the past tense is a cruel deception. Anything real is now and forever engraved on our bodies.

Death, like God, is still much too big for us. If this book were bare as a clean-picked bone, each syllable would point to that desolate beauty. But a book is built of words, and words imply a Great Struggling to Understand. Death laughs outside the boundaries of human understanding. While we huddle in libraries and houses, apartments and churches, parks andcafés, Struggling to Understand, death chomps sedately on our bones, lazy with victory.

A living corpse. A phrase which has hatched behind my eyes (seemingly without thought) and now lives as a hot pulsation in my brain as I walk, write, and sleep. I have been told that there is a miniature death in every breath: the millisecond after inhale and before exhale, when we hang in the hollow spaceless. This is another way of saying that we are all of us resurrected beings, and all of us not, our corpses sliding tight behind us in the vernix of birth.

We often assume the religious are superstitious, but maybe they are performance artists instead, embodying ideas which wander namelessly—dangerously—through the psyche.

Some memories are second skins, scenes we inhabit—seen or unseen—for the duration of our lives.

A human wants only one thing: to be seen and received. But a woman is seen only when she is sexualized. A Black person is seen only when they fit a role. And a homeless person is not seen at all.

But I just smile. Because I know now that none of us know what we want. Not until we know that we live and breathe and have our being in a web of others’ wanting.

We must be revived by the trees, which don’t apologize but grow from their roots and speak and speak simply, unified in the inarguable necessity of their biology.

And here I am before the sea, being crushed again beneath the foam of former things. But is anything former when we speak of love or pain or any great and breaking thing?