(Pro captu lectoris) habent sua fata libelli.

(According to the capabilites of the reader) books have their own destinies.

– WALTER BENJAMIN, Unpacking My Library

The Book of From and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki @ Bookshop

Quotes

It didn’t mean to kill the bird.

The voices were still new to him, and he’d never tried to speak for them before. He didn’t realize how hard it would be.

“It used to be sand,” he said. “It remembers being sand. It remembers the birds, the way their feet felt, walking. Making little tracks. It never wanted to be glass. It never wanted to be sneakily transparent. It likes birds, likes watch needed it to stop.” He glanced up then at the old woman’s face that was creased ing them from the window, so it was crying I shouldn’t have hit it, but I all over with a hundred million lines of worry and confusion. “Forget it.”

…what slavoj said was this: people are born from the womb of the world with different sensitivities, and the world needs every single one of you to experience it fully, so that it might be fully experienced, if even one person were left out, the world would be diminished. and he said you don’t have to worry about being creative. the world is creative, endlessly us, and it’s generative nature is part of who you are. the world has given you the eyes to see the beauty of its mountains and rivers, and the ears to hear the muse of its wind and sea, and the voice you need to tell it. we books are evidence that this is so. we are here to help you.

Like, when you hurt yourself, and later you remember the pain, but the memory of pain is different from actual pain, right? That’s the kind of voices things have, and the stories they tell are more like memories or dreams. You know how a dream can be totally real-seeming, but when you try to put it in words, it just kind of dissolves and melts away? That’s what happens to the dream stories of things.