Cathy DuPont

“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”
― Chinua Achebe

“Something unwanted came to life in me. It was not passion, but something maybe worse than that: memory. Of the one and only woman in my life. I did not know how she had emerged from underneath the sediment of years; she had not been so pretty as this woman, not even similar to her. Why did the one recall the other? I was more concerned with that distant one, who no longer existed, whom I had been forgetting and recalling for twenty years. She surfaced in my memory when I neither wanted nor needed her, bitter as absinthe. She had not appeared for a long time, so why did she come now? Was it because of this woman”
― Meša Selimović , Death and the Dervish

“I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.”
― Stephen Greenblatt

“Across the intersection he could see the crumbling blue-green facade of the Palace Amusements building, the grinning ten-foot-high face on its north wall smiling out on empty streets and vacant lots. The arcade entrances were covered with plywood; broken neon tubing hung from the walls. He thought of the hours he had spent there as a kid, playing pinball, firing the real .22s in the shooting gallery, riding the bumper cars. It hurt to look at it now.”
― Wallace Stroby, The Barbed-Wire Kiss: A Novel