Travis Kim

“There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children: You shall go through with it. To eight people she had said relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds). For that reason, knowing what was before them – love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places - she had often the feeling: Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, nonsense. They will be perfectly happy.

No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out – a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress – children never forget. For this reason it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what she now often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles), but as a wedge of darkness.”
― Virginia Woolfe, To the Lighthouse

“Then In-hye opens her mouth. “What I’m trying to say…,” she whispers to Yeong-hye. The ambulance chassis rattles over a hollow in the road. In-hye squeezes Yeong-hye’s shoulders. “Perhaps this is all a kind of dream.” She bows her head. But then, as though suddenly struck by something, she brings her mouth right up to Yeong-hye’s ear and carries on speaking, forming the words carefully, one by one. “I have dreams too, you know. Dreams…and I could let myself dissolve into them, let them take me over…but surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we? Because…because then…”

She raises her head again. The ambulance is rounding the last bend in the road, leaving Mount Ch’ukseong. She sees a black bird flying up toward the dark clouds. The summer sunlight dazzles her eyes, makes them sting, and her gaze cannot follow the bird’s flight anymore.

Quietly, she breathes in. The trees by the side of the road are blazing, green fire undulating like the rippling flanks of a massive animal, wild and savage. In-hye stares fiercely at the trees. As if waiting for an answer. As if protesting against something. The look in her eyes is dark and insistent.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“So long as conversation is viewed as solely a matter of what is displayed and openly reacted to by conversants, and of background understandings they share, and of what is inferable from their external behaviors, it remains accessible to the researcher. As a working assumption, most conversation studies take the shared world to be somehow independent of what occurs privately in the minds of the conversants. This methodological tack is not only convenient but has a powerful logic to recommend it--after all, individual conversants, in choosing what they will do and say next, attend to what they and their co-conversants have said and done. Examination of discourse particles, such as well, like and y'know, however, points up the fact that each Individual participant in a conversation is aware that some thoughts are not disclosed and of the fact that conversants enter material selectively in the shared world. Although the private and other worlds are essentially inaccessible to the nonparticipant observer, their existence cannot be ignored--particularly since speakers themselves often acknowledge to each other, in a number of ways, the existence and importance of their own unexpressed thinking.”
― Lawrence C. Schourup, Common Discourse Particles in English Conversation

“Now do I die and disappear,’ wouldst thou say. ‘and in a moment I am nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies.
“’But the plexus of causes returneth in which I am intertwined—it will again create me! I myself pertain to the causes of the eternal return.
“’I come again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life, or a better life, or a similar life:
“‘—I come again eternally to this identical and selfsame life, in its greatest and its smallest, to teach again the eternal return of all things—
“’—To speak again the word of the great noontide of earth and man, to announce again to man the Superman.
“’I have spoken my word. I break down by my word: so willeth mine eternal fate—as announcer do I succumb!
“’The hour hath now come for the down-goer to bless himself. Thus—endeth Zarathustra’s down-going.’”——
When the animals had spoken these words they were silent and waited, so that Zarathustra might say something to them: but Zarathustra did not hear that they were silent. ON the contrary, he lay quietly with closed eyes like a person sleeping, although he did not sleep; for he communed just then with his soul The serpent, however, and the eagle, when they found him silent in such wise, respected the great stillness around him, and prudently retired.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: Reader's Edition