Chang-Rae Lee - On Such a Full Sea (2014)

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For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

Chang-Rae Lee
We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears.

Chang-Rae Lee
For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

Chang-Rae Lee
You can be affected by a person because of something particular they said or did but sometimes how a person was, a manner of being, that gets most deeply absorbed, and prompts you to revisit certain parts of your life with an enhanced perspective, flowing forward right up to now.

Chang-Rae Lee
A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there's finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.

Chang-Rae Lee
Don't sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Chang-Rae Lee
For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it's when we're closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we'll tread through any flame.

Chang-Rae Lee
Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

Chang-Rae Lee
In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

Chang-Rae Lee
For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.

Chang-Rae Lee
What hasty preparations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we're sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we'll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.

Chang-Rae Lee
For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges muting over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic.

Chang-Rae Lee