Reif Larsen Quotes

Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge.

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.

I suddenly had an idea of how adults can hold on to a feeling for very long periods of time, long after the event is finished, long after cards have been sent and apologies made and everyone else had moved on. Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions

I would not know what to say to you, except this: there was never a map that got it all right, and truth and beauty were never married to one another for long.

Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions.

Do you ever get the feeling like you already know the entire contents of the universe somewhere inside of your head, as if you were born with a complete map of this world already grafted onto the folds of your cerebellum and you are just spending your entire life figuring out how to access this map?

I suddenly missed the curious shelving patterns of my room, those old planks from the barn groaning under the weight of the notebooks. Shelving is an intimate thing, like the fingerprint of a room.

I do love the sound of ripping corn husks. The violence of the noise, the sustained popping and shoring of the silky organic threads, made me think of someone tearing up an expensive and potentially Italian set of trousers in a fit of madness that this person just might regret later.

I was only twelve, but through the slow, inevitable burn of a thousand sunrises and sunsets, a thousand maps traced and retraced, I had already absorbed the valuable precept that everything crumbled into itself eventually, and to cultivate a crankiness about this was just a waste of time.

Did the true, umbilical love that bound people together for the length of their lives require a certain intellectual dislocution in order to push past our insistent rationalization and enter the rough, uneven space inside our hearts?

Изведнъж се замислих как възрастните можеха да задържат чувствата си дълго след като събитието е отминало, много след като са изпратили писмо с извинения и всички останали са продължили нататък. Възрастните бяха събирачи на стари ненужни чувства.

One cannot spend one's entire life running into bathrooms when danger calls!

A text is evolutionary by its very nature.

The sun was crouched on its haunches over the Pioneers. The mountains were both purple and brown, the angle of light hitting the moiré of pine and fir and bleeding out a smoky mirage that made the valley seem to tremble. It was a sight. We both looked.

. . . the mountains sighed with the weight of the heavens on their backs.

A novel is a tricky thing to map.

I just get a feeling sometimes that everything is predetermined, and I am going through the motions of tracing an existence that will be what it will already be.

Doodles were fertile ground; they were the visual evidence of heavy cognitive lifting. Although this was not always true: Ricky Lepardo was a doodler and he was not a heavy cognitive lifter.

Dr. Clair looked at Layton. The mancala pieces were still in her hand. If Angela Ashforth ever says anything like that to you again, you tell her that just because she's insecure about being a little girl in a society that puts an inordinate amount of pressure on little girls to live up to certain physical, emotional and ideological standards -- many of which are improper, unhealthy and self-perpetuating -- doesn't mean she has to take her misplaced self-loathing out on a nice boy like you. You may be inherently a part of the problem but that doesn't mean you aren't a nice boy with nice manners and it certainly doesn't mean you have AIDS." I'm not sure I can remember all that," Layton said. Well then, tell Angela that her mother is a white trash drunk from Butte.

Доктор Клер беше от майките, които ще те научат на Менделеевата таблица, докато тикат лъжица с каша в бебешката ти уста, но - в ерата на глобалния тероризъм и отвличания на деца - няма да попитат кой те търси по телефона.

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected. —Reif Larsen I love maps not because they dictate the route or tell me when or how to travel, but simply because they mark the waypoints I will eventually visit. Knowing that these places exist and that they are well traveled, even if they are unexplored by me, is powerful. I

What happened to all the historical detritus in the world? Some of it made it into drawers of museums, okay, but what about all those old postcards, the photoplates, the maps on napkins, the private journals with little latches on them? Did they burn in house fires? Were they sold at yard sales for 75¢? Or did they all just crumble into themselves like everything else in this world, the secret little stories contained within their pages disappearing, disappearing, and now gone forever.

Whenever I smelled the same perfume on other women, no matter where I was, I was instantly transported back to that feeling of discovery. The sensation of fingertips against old paper, whose surface was powdery and fragile, like the membrane of a moth’s wing.

Колко много снимки в целия свят запечатваха последвалия миг, не успявах да уловят онова, предизвикало фотографа да натисне копчето, а вместо това хващаха последвалите руини, смеха, реакцията, разплискалите се кръгове във водата.

I suppose he represented the worst of what rural life can do to a man: he was racist, uneducated, and badly in need of dental work.

WHEN ASKED, CHARLENE had always explained away her life as a series of false starts that finally had disqualified her from running the race.

To see the stars, you must be able to first see the night.

Навън ме посрещна обичайната за миговете преди зазоряване кристална чистота, когато инерцията на живота все още не е завладяла деня. Въздухът не беше изпълнен с разговори, мисли, смях и намръщени погледи. Хората спяха и всичките им идеи, надежди и тайни помисли бяха омотани в света на сънищата, а този тук беше останал чист, свеж и хладен като бутилка мляко от хладилника.

Irgendwie fühle ich mich immer noch wie ein Kind. Pass auf, dass du das nicht verlierst; das ist mein Rat an dich. Die Welt wird alles tun, um dich zu bescheißen, aber wenn du dein Leben lang irgendwo tief drin ein bisschen sechzehn bist, dann kommst du schon irgendwie durch.

Може би смисълът на четенето на романи се криеше именно в балансирането на насладата от бягството от реалността със съзнанието за измислица, но аз така и не успявах да поддържам едновременно реалното и фантазното. Може би просто трябваше да си възрастен, за да осъществиш този изумително сложен акт на едновременно вярване и невярване.

I'm a practicing Zen Buddhist and I'm influenced by my readings in that tradition, such as the notion that everyone is born a perfect being and we spend most of our lives with a clouded vision trying to realize our perfection," he says. At critical moments in the book, T.S. registers his inkling of this realization. When he makes his maps, it feels like taking down dictation from the universe.

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning: it bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.” Reif Larsen

All of a sudden, she was enveloped by a kind of vertigo -- she had felt this sensation before, though she could not remember when. It was a feeling of being not herself, of being trapped in the wrong body, as if she had recently been miscast in a play that was her own life.

Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library.

This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.

Instead of falling to the ground like a heavy doll, as Kermin had seen the prisoners do at the Chetnik executions, his mother shrank into herself, a reverse blossoming, coming to rest in a sitting position, like a ruminative Buddha

Of the seventeen thousand prisoners who passed through Tuol Sleng, only seven survived.

As much as she might argue otherwise, his mother was a fragile woman.

The threat of her relapsing had created a strong gravitational field around their little family and was part of the reason he had never left home. He

This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds.

It was not uncommon for his father to toss out the phrase “Jebem ti supu od klinova Isusovih!” which translated roughly as “Fuck the soup made from the nails of Jesus’s crucifixion,” and not think twice about it, even if in English he was unfailingly polite.

And yet sometimes we become the person we most dread. Or maybe we dread most the person we know we are to become. 11.

N.B.: Do you think the artist becomes more critical to society in wartime? M.D.: The artist is always critical to society, even though the artist must end up hating society. War happens when society forgets its artists. N.B.: War happens for many reasons. M.D.: War happens for only one reason: we cannot see past our own death.2 “No

It's okay to be scared," she said. "It means you have something to live for.

Were I to spend my life commenting on the world that I see, I would never see the world.

Memory is a weapon too powerful for any one man to yield... I have come to realize that forgetting is our greatest gift.

Speech is not a prerequisite for comprehension.

If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that comprehension is not an idea, it’s an act. You must be able to use what you understand.

If you stared at a river long enough, you started to believe that the water, and not the earth, was the one true thing.

Reality, has little bearing in the truth; truth is instead a confluence of time and story.

War causes strange things to happen. People’s priorities shift.

It’s the idea that if only we hadn’t been interrupted, then we could’ve accomplished our magnum opus... but in the end, we come to realize that the interruption is the work itself.

We think, and therefore we cannot just be.

The Cambodians believe the eyes never change, you can go through an infinite number of reincarnations, but your eyes will always remain the same. It’s how we recognize our friends and enemies across time.

We must not let others do work we should be doing.

Entropy would eventually reign supreme. It was the beginning of the end.

The ring of people who had stopped to watch were doing so not because of her enthralling acrobatics, but because of their collective awareness that this women, in that moment, could only be doing exactly what she was doing. The laws of the universe determined it.

He nodded to the bird, conspiratorially, as if what had just transpired had all been on purpose. The duck had nodded back.

If there was one thing Serbs could never abandon, it was their dangerously poetic and causal manner of cussing.

Life spills across generations in the simplest of ways.

War happens for only one reason: we cannot see past our own death.

She is brief, this life, and then she leaves us when she realizes her mistake.

If you admit you are uncertain, than you are that much closer to certainly.

He viewed our peaceful coexistence with the unknown as a testament to the capacities of the human mind.

Observation is precisely the problem. Observation, as we understand it, is the nemesis of understanding. We’re ibsessed with this act of witnessing - yet witnessing is an action that irrevocably affects the subject. As it turns out, we can only witness the witnessing.

Bohr knew, in the way that few great men do, exactly how much of the universe could never be understood at all.

I’ll tell you what it is: we are confined to consequence. We can survive the now only because we claim to know what comes next. We are terrified of the truth: that by saying ‘if this,’ we have already destroyed ‘then that.

The Japanese have a saying: Shiranu ga hotake. It means: You must be prepared not to know what you want to know, you must be prepared for the question to be the answer.

The Sami have a saying: ‘En rein som star stille, er ikke en rein.’ ‘A stick reindeer is not a reindeer.’ Migration is a part of their being. To move is to exist.

Her sister was cursed with the unexamined libertarian ignorance that only the very privileged could espouse: she believed everything that happened to you, good or bad, was the result of your own choosing.

Books, the cataloging of books, that pursuit without end, was the only way to quell the panic.

It was the kind of collision where there was no time for courtship, where two wounded planets lock into orbit and can never quite free themselves from the insistence of their gravitational pull.

And then everything imploded, suddenly, as if it had always been meant to implode like this, as if time were only a prelude to all that which must come to an end.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, people are often confused by it. Heisenberg stated that both the position and velocity of a particle cannot simultaneously be known. You measure one, the other will always remain uncertain. The observation affects that which is observed. This is where people confuse the issue. It’s not the act of observation which makes things inherently uncertain - it’s the system itself which is uncertain. We blame it on us, the observers, but this is merely a convenient excuse, for the uncertainty is actually built into the world. A particle can never have two definite attributes - direction and position. If your define one, the other fades into indetermination. And so: there is no way to know everything. You must choose your knowledge.

Listen to me: nothing is impossible.

We’re foolish when we’re young. We’re blind to the truth.

And yet sometimes we become the person we most dread. Or maybe we dread most the person we know we are to become.

I’m afraid of a world without meaning. I’m afraid of our capacity for self-deception. I’m afraid of being without being. I’m afraid of dying alone.

A man can grow accustomed to anything if he lives with it long enough.

A river cannot forget. It remembers every person who has ever put their foot in it. It’s like a book of all time.

Just listen to the story. Don’t be so critical all the time. It isn’t good for you.

Nothing is decided when you’re born. Everything is still possible. If you decide to change your life, you can.

Devotion, at its core, must be a kind of truth.

The only person who can defeat you is you.

Life had filled her quiver with the right arrows, even when the target itself had been too far away to see.

Without observation, there is no life.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are all equal rights. No one can tell us how to make difference from others. We are all made from the same branches of trees. We are all human branches. Past is past, future is future. Man is man. Women is women.

Routine had a way of erasing intamacy’s quiet particulars.

It was often easier to discover someone through his books rather than his words, to see the overlap and divergence between ones taste and another’s and then to triangulate the rest of that person’s self appropriately.

The world is as we perceive it.

When did a book - ushered across linguistic oceans by the unsteady stoop of translation - stop being the same book?

What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you do now.

The child, as only a child can do, changed everything in an instant.

Her language was uniquely her own, an island of marooned expression.

It was like I saw the world, in a different light, a different set of possibilities. Suddenly there was a way for me to be me.

If they are to achieve anything in the future, they must see what magnificence was possible in the past.

He had seen enough to know that in every death, someone suffered and someone triumphed, and often those two were the same person.

Rule #238: Don’t do it because you can. Do it because you must.

Rule #101: We are more than our words and our words are more than us.