Senna Quotes

Tell me a truth, Senna." "I don't know how." "Then tell me a lie." "I don't love you." "The truth is for the mind," he says. "Lies are for the heart. So let's just keep lying.

We are all going to die, but I’m going to die first. In the very last second of my life, I will think of you. Senna

Senna: “Why are you here?” Isaac: “Because you are.

Isaac: “It hurts me when you cry.” Senna: “I’m crying, but I don’t feel anything,” Isaac: “Yes, I know. That’s what hurts me the most.

It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.

You’ve been silent your whole life. You were silent when we met, silent when you suffered. Silent when life kept hitting you. I was like that too, a little. But not like you. You are a stillness. And I tried to move you. It didn’t work. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t move me. I heard everything you didn’t say. I heard it so loudly that I couldn’t shut it off. Your silence, Senna, I hear it so loudly.

I heard everything you didn’t say. I heard it so loudly that I couldn’t shut it off. Your silence, Senna, I hear it so loudly.

His lips move against my hair. “I’m sorry, Senna.” I tremble. He’s sorry? Him? “For what?” There is a million year pause. “I couldn’t save you this time.” I cry into his chest. Not because he couldn’t. Because he wanted to.

On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, 'Okay, this is the limit'. And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

I am not designed to come second or third, I am designed to win.

You have to believe someone sometime, Senna. When they tell you that. Otherwise you’ll never know what it feels like to be loved. And that’s a sad thing.

I can only control my actions, not their reactions," Senna replied. "But I have to live with both.

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile.

And suddenly I realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension.

You either commit yourself as a professional racing driver that's designed to win races or you come second or you come third or fifth and am not design to come third, fourth or fifth, I race to win.

Tell me a truth, Senna." "I don't know how," I breath. "Then tell me a lie." "I don't love you," I say. I sink beneath the weight of it all. Isaac stirs behind me, and then he is leaning over me, his elbows on either side of my head. "The truth is for the mind," he says. "Lies are for the heart. So let's just keep lying.

You know, I tried not to think of this place. I tried to let it go. To leave it behind. But it always came back to me, in my dreams. I'd dream about these details, these objects and people and places I'd left behind, and I'd wake up crying.

We were lying on our backs in the foothills, watching the sky and making a list called "Never." All the things we would never do. Let's never get married. Let's never get fat. Let's never sleep with a married man. Let's never stop being students, even after we graduate. Let's never get dull-eyed and ironic. Let's never get stuck in a rut-- or trapped in a life we didn't choose. Let's never grow bitter.

‎With regard to performance, commitment, effort, dedication, there is no middle ground. Or you do something very well or not at all.

With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

I’m sorry, Senna.” I tremble. He’s sorry? Him? “For what?” There is a million year pause. “I couldn’t save you this time.” I cry into his chest. Not because he couldn’t. Because he wanted to

When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.

Christopher flushed, gaped, and then laughed. I gave him credit for that. Lots of guys can laugh at someone else. Chistopher could laugh at himself. You see a lot less of that.

You know a guy is funny when a week later you can still feel the little knives he stuck in you.

Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose.

I have no idols. I respect hard work, dedication and competence

She has decided all university campuses are alike- the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and poverty.

I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.

It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere. But it’s a good place to be, I think. It’s like floating. From up above, you can see everything at once. It’s the only way how.

He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.

The thing about being a woman, a mother, a wife, was that if you wanted to be any more than those things you had to hire another wife. Somebody had to be the wife in a family. Rich women got to pay somebody else to be them—a stunt double to make it look like they were doing everything well when, in fact, they were doing only the fun parts.

It was a man taking a machine and a machine taking a man into secret places, into the subliminal.

Dying is easy Senna, living is hard.

Maybe dreams aren't in your head. Maybe dreams are memories of another universe.

Mrs March knew that experience was an excellent teacher, and, when it was possible, she left her children to learn alone the lessons which she would gladly have made easier, if they had not objected to taking advice as much as they did salts and senna.*

Looking at those photographs, I remembered how my parents had never said “I love you” to each other. How they had said only “I miss you.” At the time, I hadn’t been able to figure out what this meant. But now it seemed clear: this was how they defined their love—by how deeply they missed each other when they were together. They felt the loss before it happened, and their love was defined by that loss. They hungered even as they ate, thirsted even as they drank. My mother once told me to live my life as if I were already dead. “Live each day as if you know it’s gonna be gone tomorrow,” she had said. That was how my parents loved each other, with a desperate, melancholy love, a fierce nostalgia for the present.

My father tells me that the further you get away from an experience, the deeper it roots itself inside of you. Don't fool yourself, baby, he said. Time does not heal and history is not progressive.

In those years, I felt myself to be incomplete—a gray blur, a body in motion, forever galloping toward completion—half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked, not quite ready for consumption.

Jalil has this habit of not turning his head much, just moving his eyes, skeptical, appraising, not impressed by much. It takes him a while to talk and you might think he's slow. But when you get to know him, you realize he's slow to talk because his brain has already jumped ahead three spaces and he has to back up to deal with you.

I'm very privileged. I've always had a very good life. But everything that I've gotten out of life was obtained through dedication and a tremendous desire to achieve my goals... a great desire for victory, meaning victory in life, not as a driver. To all of you who have experienced this or are searching now, let me say that whoever you may be in your life, whether you're at the highest or most modest level, you must show great strength and determination and do everything with love and a deep belief in God. One day, you'll achieve your aim and you'll be successful.

By being a racing driver you are under risk all the time. By being a racing driver means you are racing with other people. And if you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver because we are competing, we are competing to win.

I think that's his point," April said. "Not dumb, maybe. Just naive. I mean we come from a cynical age. Suspicious of everything. Maybe thats the advantage we have." "Yeah our bad attitudes versus their swords and axes and giant wolves," Christopher said darkly.

much privilege leads to bad manners,

In dreams you lose normal cause and effect. You jump around in time. This is reality. Jalil

I tried to tear my mind off my own self loathing.-David

Guarda Momo. La Senna adora i ponti, è come una donna che va matta per i braccialetti.

Joshen tipped her chin up and kissed her. He was always soft and gentle, but today Senna felt an undeniable hunger somewhere deep inside him. He was trying to suppress it. But she didn’t want that. She wanted him to banish the lingering foulness of the curse and the fear that had never released her from its sweaty grasp, replacing all of that with the sweet taste of his mouth.

In cima alla via Guénégaud, venendo dalla strada lungo la Senna, si trova il passaggio del Ponte Nuovo, una specie di corridoio stretto e oscuro che va dalla via Mazarino alla via della Senna. Quel passaggio ha, al massimo, trenta passi di lunghezza e due di larghezza; è selciato di pietre giallastre, consunte, sconnesse, che trasudano sempre un'acre umidità; la vetrata che lo ricopre, tagliata ad angolo retto, è nera di sporcizia. Nei bei giorni d'estate, quando un ardente sole incendia le vie, un chiarore biancastro cade dai vetri sporchi e si trascina miseramente nel passaggio. Nei brutti giorni d'inverno, nelle mattinate di nebbia, i vetri gettano soltanto oscurità sulle pietre viscide, oscurità sporca e ignobile.

Jane's father once told her that white people believed, deep in their hearts, that Black people would all choose to become white if they could. But Black people didn't want to be white, he had told her. They only wanted to have what white people had. He had said race was always about money, and money was always about race. That's what white people didn't understand. Black people wanted only a big yellow Victorian on the hill, not to be the white people who lived there.

Humor. The just-nearly-died brand of giddy humor.

Don't worry dreams aren't real. They're just neurons firing randomly in your brain.

Hey I basically agree with you. I believe in what I can see, touch, eat, drink and spend. Everything else is bull." April nodded. "You are so right, Christopher. I mean,you are so forceful and all that, you just get me hot. You really do, and we're going to die anyway, so just take me now." She scooted towards Christopher and lowered her voice to a husky whisper. "You think I'm kidding but I'm not. I want you here and now." She was just convincing enough that Christopher made a sort of move to put his arm around her. She pushed away, laughing slyly. "Ah, so you just believe in what you can see, huh? Looks to me like you were ready to believe in a miracle.

And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

Has estado callada tu vida entera. Estuviste callada cuando nos conocimos, callada cuando sufriste. Callada cuando la vida continúo golpeándote. Yo también estaba así, un poco. Pero no como tú. Eres inmovible. Y yo trate de moverte. No funciono. Pero eso no significa que tú no me hayas movido. Escuche todo lo que no dijiste. Lo escuche tan fuerte que no podía callarlo. Tu silencio, Senna, lo escuche en voz alta.

You are the only member of this Sleepwalker team with formal medical training, Specialist Yorrik. "Wry self-deprecation: I am a pediatric allergist. Auditory, olfactory, esophageal." Anax Therion and Senna stared at him. "In sheepish explanation: Ear, nose, and throat. I do sniffles.

I have no idols. I admire work, dedication and competence.

mulling over all the creative ways I can spike an apple with enough senna to leave a fourteen-foot Ocean Drake shitting undigested seaweed for a week.

Your silence, Senna, I hear it so loudly.

—Todavía te veo, Senna —dice en mi cabello—. Nunca puedes dejar de ver lo que reconoces como una parte de ti mismo.

Tell me a truth, Senna.“ “I don’t know how.” “Then tell me a lie.” “I don’t love you.” “The truth is for the mind,” he says. “Lies are for the heart. So let’s just keep lying.

You have to believe someone sometime, Senna. When they tell you that. Otherwise you'll never know what it feels like to be loved. And that's a sad thing.

and very carefully to them the truth of what you know, but with kindness in your heart. Have compassion for them, because not everybody starts on an equal playing field. Love, Gloria

Do you think our luck is changing?” “I don’t believe in luck. I believe in resilience. As an artist, you have to be resilient above all else.” He lifted his glass. “Here’s to your sticking with it.

He seemed particularly insistent. I both did and didn’t want to be left alone at the house with my mother. There was an aching in my chest that surprised me, and my eyes were watering up against my will.

Has estado en silencio toda tu vida. Estabas en silencio cuando nos conocimos, en silencio cuando sufrías. En silencio cuando la vida seguía golpeándote. Yo era así también, un poco. Pero no como tú. Tú eres una quietud. E intenté moverte. No funcionó. Pero eso no significa que tú no me hayas movido. Escuché todo lo que no decías. Lo escuche tan fuerte que no podía apagarlo. Tu silencio, Senna, lo escuchaba muy fuerte.

She'd had her own childhood of moments just like this. She too had parents who were over-educated and underpaid - it was the worst combination. They had raised her and her sister in a ghetto of artists and poets, guaranteeing that they would be alienated from rich children and poor children alike, thanks to a cultural and political vocabulary that suggest class and privilege without actual class and privilege - gauche caviar without the actual caviar.

And now the senna and camomile were to flavour all her life. She was no longer to enjoy that mystical double existence, those delicious glimpses of dreamland, which made up for all the dulness of the common world that surrounded her.

Jane had no urge to return to the East Coast, not anymore - but on days like this, she did miss it, the drama of the seasons, the changing mood ring of the sky, even the statues of old white men, something solid she could rail against.

Mrs. March knew that experience was an excellent teacher, and when it was possible she left her children to learn alone the lessons which she would gladly have made easier, if they had not objected to taking advice as much as they did salts and senna. "Very well, Amy, if your heart is set upon it, and you see your way through without too great an outlay of money, time, and temper, I'll say no more. Talk it over with the girls, and whichever way you decide, I'll do my best to help you.

And there are those who prefer cappuccino, which in turn can be served in several varieties... . Some want it scuro, with less milk, some want it chiaro, with note milk, and some prefer it workout foam, senna schiuma, and there is generally a shaker of cocoa powder somewhere available for those eager for a bit of chocolate. Caffelatte, a hot drink we Americans mysteriously have dubbed a “latte” (which in Italian simply means “milk”), comes in only one variety and is a morning drink, as is a cappuccino.

Dietro le Tuileries, il cielo si tingeva di ardesia, gli alberi del giardino formavano due masse enormi, violacee in alto. Si accendevano i lampioni a gas, e la Senna, verdastra in tutta la sua estensione, si lacerava in un marezzo d'argento contro i pilastri del ponte.

eyeballs drifting at the surface and all sorts of cables and tubes feeding what remains. But I don’t want to be kept alive. Because I know what’s next. I’ve seen it on TV. A documentary I saw about Mongolia, of all places. It was the best thing I’ve ever seen on television, other than the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, of course, the greatest automobile race of all time in which Ayrton Senna proved himself to be a genius in the rain. After the 1993 Grand Prix, the best thing I’ve ever seen on TV is a documentary that explained everything to me, made it all clear, told the whole truth: when a dog

Every generation must leave an impression. And it had to keep pressing into the group ahead of it until the impression was made permanent. Then a fresh generation would be born and look around, bewildered, at their elders and assert some newfangled idea that years from now would make perfect sense.

A therapist had once told her that if she had a baby she was going to have to lower her standards. Otherwise, she’d be the only person she felt was good enough to care for her child, and her husband would get away with not helping at all. If you lowered your standards, the therapist told her, you would end up with a coparent who did some things very badly but some things well—and your kids would be better off because they’d have two parents who weren’t resentful and overburdened. The same could be said about sitters. You had to lower your standards, or you’d never get away and replenish yourself.

Don't hate white people. They can't help it. They have a learning disability. They need your compassion. They need accommodations. They are like preschoolers--their understanding of race is so basic. They can't be faulted for being uncomfortable with somebody who has what amounts to a graduate degree in race--that is, us. It's not fair for preschoolers to be placed in the same classroom with graduate students and be forced to compete. Pity them, Maria. Take their hands and explain very slowly and very carefully to them the truth of what you know, but with kindness in your heart. Have compassion for them, because not everybody starts on an equal playing field.

Origins sure are powerful and sh*t. You can’t shake them.

David, when it happens... when it happens, David, will you save me?

Our eyes caught, and I saw her as she had been and would always be, a long-lost daughter of Mayflower histories, forever in motion, running from or toward an unutterable hideaway.

What world do you write about?” Jane liked his question. What world? He was clearly somebody who understood how this worked.

I recalled a theory my father had concocted one night, while we sat in an Oakland juke joint sharing a plate of ribs. He'd said humor, above all else, was what bound each of us and separated each of us from one another. Humor was the great moment of truth. What we thought was funny was how we defined ourselves, and revealed ourselves, whether we knew it or not.

Like most people, Jane considered her generation superior to those that came after. But sometimes, driving away from the college, she would remember herself at her students’ age and think that she had not been so unlike them. Because her bratty students were, she knew, almost always right. And the point of young people was to be annoying about the truth they saw until it became evident to people like herself.

You’ve been silent your whole life. You were silent when we met, silent when you suffered. Silent when life kept hitting you. I was like that too, a little. But not like you. You are a stillness. And I tried to move you. It didn’t work. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t move me. I heard everything you didn’t say. I heard it so loudly that I couldn’t shut it off. Your silence, Senna, I hear it so loudly.” ― Tarryn Fisher, Mud Vein

Guarda i rifiuti di questa città”, disse finalmente, e le sue dita indicarono la strada che ci sfrecciava accanto, “tutti i rifiuti di questa città, dove li portano? Non so dove li portano, ma potrebbe benissimo essere la mia stanza.” “È molto più probabile”, obbiettai, “che li buttino nella Senna.” Ma sentii, quando mi risvegliai e mi guardai intorno in quella stanza, tutta la spavalderia e la vigliaccheria della sua figura retorica. Questi non erano i rifiuti di Parigi, che sarebbero stati anonimi: questa era la vita rigurgitata di Giovanni.

Jujubean is gonna probably marry a white guy, and her kids will marry white people and I’ll end up with some Abercrombie & Fitch motherfuckers for grandkids. It’ll be a Quincy Jones Christmas extravaganza. I’m paying fifty-fucking-thousand dollars a year for my own extinction. If that ain’t some volunteer slavery, what is?

Once, so long ago, she’d made a list of all the cities she’d lived in her life and the impression they’d left on her. Brooklyn to her was the grayest. London was the warmest. Paris was the coldest. San Francisco was the whitest. Atlanta was the blackest. Cambridge was the bluest. Los Angeles was the loneliest and the most free.

people don’t realize that the thing that separates real artists from wannabes is real ones finish what they started. Persistence. Commitment to a work nobody seems to want or need until you show them what it was they were missing. Like with my students, it’s always how I can separate the wheat from the chaff, you know? There are some students who work with a relentlessness, an urgency, and cannot be swayed from finishing a piece. And there are others, some of the most talented ones, who are just doing it for the praise. And you sort of know they’re not going to be artists, not in the real sense. They’re going to give up, go into graphic design or advertising or whatever. Real artists are relentless.

Novel writing was too much. It was such a relief to dispense with the tangle of language—all those heavy blocks of prose she’d had to wade through to world build as they called it in workshop. Novel writing was too many different jobs under the title of one. You had to be all the actors, like Eddie Murphy in Coming to America. You had to be the character of the mother, the father, the son, and the daughter, the mailman, the dog, the murderer, and the victim. But it was worse even than that. Because you also had to be the set designer, the set builder, the gaffer, the lighting man. You had to make it rain and make the sun come out, describing every change in the weather so the reader could smell and feel it. And the only tool they gave you to do all this labor was language.

I am to be sworn, my Lord, am I?’ said the chemist. ‘Certainly, sir,’ replied the testy little judge. ‘Very well, my Lord,’ replied the chemist, in a resigned manner. ‘Then there’ll be murder before this trial’s over; that’s all. Swear me, if you please, Sir;’ and sworn the chemist was, before the judge could find words to utter. ‘I merely wanted to observe, my Lord,’ said the chemist, taking his seat with great deliberation, ‘that I’ve left nobody but an errand-boy in my shop. He is a very nice boy, my Lord, but he is not acquainted with drugs; and I know that the prevailing impression on his mind is, that Epsom salts means oxalic acid; and syrup of senna, laudanum. That’s all, my Lord.’ With this, the tall chemist composed himself into a comfortable attitude, and, assuming a pleasant expression of countenance, appeared to have prepared himself for the worst.

Even though the wreckage had been described to her, and though she was still in pain, the sight horrified and amazed her, and there was something she noticed about it that particularly gave her the creeps. Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goose-foot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.

He put his mouth by her ear. “Easy, now, Senna.” His thumb stroked her jaw as if he were gentling a wild thing. His sculpted body was hot behind hers. “Be easy " “Stop touching me,” she pleaded in a whisper. His thumb stopped moving. “What?” “Kiss me.” The rest of him went completely still... “What did ye say?” he asked in a low, masculine rumble… Her heart started a strange thudding. Their voices were so quiet that the breeze blowing over them nearly drowned them out. Both were held paralyzed by the riders on the highway below. No one was going anywhere. In fact, it might all be over in a matter of minutes. And all she wanted was his touch. If I am going to die, she suddenly decided, it will not be absent the touch of this Irishman.She touched his hand and slid it across the mere inch back to her lips. Shutting her eyes, she trailed the tip of her tongue over his warm flesh.His body rippled slightly, like wind over waves. She felt every muscle in his body shift, very minutely, very definitely. He brushed his thumb once over her parted lips. Her breath shuddered out. “Did ye tell me to kiss ye, Senna?” “I did.” Her whisper trembled. “Why?” “Because,” she whispered, “if I’m going to die, it will not be lacking all the things I am lacking at present.” A pause. “Ye’re lacking a kiss, then?” She nodded.

It's funny, you know. We're free. We make choices. We weigh things in our minds, consider everything carefully, use all the tools of logic and education. And in the end, what we mostly do is what we have no choice but to do. Makes you think, why bother? But you bother because you do, that's why. Because you're a DNA-brand computer running Childhood 1.0 software. They update the software but the changes are always just around the edges. You have the brain you have, the intelligence, the talents, the strengths and weaknesses you have, from the moment they take you out of the box and throw away the Styrofoam padding. But you have the fears you picked up along the way. The terrors of age four or six or eight are never suspended, just layered over. The dread I'd felt so recently, a dread that should be so much greater because the facts had been so much more horrible, still could not diminish the impact of memories that had been laid down long years before. It's that way all through life, I guess. I have a relative who says she still gets depressed every September because in the back of her mind it's time for school to start again. She's my great-aunt. The woman is sixty-seven and still bumming over the first day of school five-plus decades ago. It's sad in a way because the pleasures of life get old and dated fast. The teenage me doesn't get the jolt the six-year-old me got from a package of Pop Rocks. The me I've become doesn't rush at the memories of the day I skated down a parking ramp however many years ago. Pleasure fades, gets old, gets thrown out with last year's fad. Fear, guilt, all that stuff stays fresh. Maybe that's why people get so enraged when someone does something to a kid. Hurt a kid and he hurts forever. Maybe an adult can shake it off. Maybe. But with a kid, you hurt them and it turns them, shapes them, becomes part of the deep, underlying software of their lives. No delete. I don't know. I don't know much. I feel like I know less all the time. Rate I'm going, by the time I'm twenty-one I won't know a damned thing. But still I was me. Had no choice, I guess. I don't know, maybe that's bull and I was just feeling sorry for myself. But, bottom line, I dried my eyes, and I pushed my dirty, greasy hair back off my face, and I started off down the road again because whatever I was, whoever I was, however messed up I might be, I wasn't leaving April behind. Maybe it was all an act programmed into me from the get-go, or maybe it grew up out of some deep-buried fear, I mean maybe at some level I was really just as pathetic as Senna thought I was. Maybe I was a fake. Whatever. Didn't matter. I was going back to the damned dragon, and then I was getting April out, and everything and everyone else could go screw themselves. One good thing: For now at least, I was done being scared.

You work for 30, 40 years. 40 freaking years getting in the car, driving through traffic, dealing with BS, driving home, and taking the kids to buy sneakers?” I realized April had come over. How long she had been listening, I didn't know. “ And you don't want all that?”, She asked me. “Maybe . Someday,” I said. “I don't even know if I'll go to college, but my mom's looking at an MBA for me, and I go along, mostly. Why? Because I care about business? No, because everyone's on me about my future. Got to get the good grades so you can get a good college so you can get a good business school so you can get on with some big firmware you Shuffle papers and tap on the keyboard That's it, man, that's your life so you get old and wonder what the hell you did with your life. That's not life. Not for a man, anyway.” April cocked an eyebrow. “The way you described it, it doesn't sound like life for anyone. That won't be my life. You leave it all the good stuff: friends and family. Kids. The things you love to do." I waved my hand, dismissing it all. “There used to be an adventure. You know? Going west in a wagon train, or going to war, or exploring some place no human being had ever been before. Now what do we have? Look at Sven. Look at that guy. He's my age, look at his life. Then look at mine or Jalil’s or your’s.” April barked out a laugh. “He can barely talk because someone rammed a sword through his mouth. “ I nodded. “You know the difference between him and me? We're both about 16. But he's a man. I'm a boy.” April made a face, angry, dismissive, frustrated. “What is it with you guys? Is it the testosterone? You know, David, it's the dawn of the 21st century and you live in the richest, most powerful Nation on Earth where there's almost no one starving and no one's slave and no one invading to murder and pillage and rape. And finally, finally after thousands of years of men slaughtering men, women, and children over nonsense, we have a few places on Earth where there's a little piece, a little decency a few places where most people get to be born and live their lives without total horror being rained down on them, and your reaction is, ‘this has to stop!

Some Brazilian bloke called Ayrton Senna da Silva seemed to be doing pretty well driving for Van Diemen. So thinking that this car must be great,

...if the importance of being physically well prepared is obvious, mental preparation may seem less decisive. But that is not so, because before being a racing driver, you have to become a man. If that does not happen, it does not matter how much talent you might have, you will never reach the top, because for one reason or another the results will seem to elude you.

During the formation lap - and this is something you learn quickly in the lower formulaes - the driver must also leave his mark on his opponents, let everyone know he is not there to be pushed around, that he will finish as high as he possibly can. A squeeze on a bend, a hint of overtaking, a braking maneuver extended to within a few centimetres of the gearbox of the car in front demonstrate your intentions and ambitions: these feints and thrusts are a sort of declaration of war.

Here are some rules: never let an opponent know where you are faster than him (or where he is slower) so that you do not lose the element of surprise, allowing your rival to take defensive action. You must act decisively, without the slightest hesitation: once a decision has been taken, it has to be carried through. Don't fall into the rhythm of the driver you are chasing, but keep your own. Have the strength of purpose to run an independent race, in the firm belief that the 'study phase' will be short-lived. Use your intuition and imagination, because the one thing that is not legislated in motor racing is overtaking.

The main point is this: never give up and never lose heart.

There are drivers who have successfully made tactics the key to their approach and exploited them to the full. A mature driver must have an understanding of race tactics, he cannot always follow his nose. This is something that requires experience and the tempering of your aggression: A driver who sees the race like a chess game is easy to spot as he stops getting involved in accidents and aims for points and not just wins. This kind of driving is very effective over a season when aiming for the world title. Choosing the best set-up (a less fast car, but one that will be reliable) or the right time to stop for tyres, and knowing when to relinquish a position when the race situation calls for it are all part of this.

The dialogue with the pits is very important for a driver who uses his head, and this is why, when choosing a team, you have to give careful consideration to its management.

To get to the top of motor racing, to drive a Formula 1 car in one of the leading teams, you have to have certain qualities in the right proportion. One of them has always been much admired, and is now more important than ever: consistency. What matters is not a single outstanding move but your performance across the full duration of a race, a racing season, and indeed your career...Clearly consistency is not simply a natural talent within a driver, but the outcome of a long and tough physical programme which will allow us to give our best at all times and reach the end of a race - even the toughest - as fresh as we were to start.

Broadly speaking any kind of mental training which aims to increase a driver's effectiveness at the wheel of a racing car must start from the assumption that victory is a consequence of the work done. With this attitude, victory ceases to be the main objective and is replaced by the quest for perfection in the various factors which contribute to victory, such as fitness training, setting up the car, managing a set of tyres properly, knowledge of the race tracks and so on, always focusing on smaller and smaller things...For a driver, getting into the car must be like going to the office for a top manager: it is his everyday job.

Ayrton Senna. He was admired, loved, cheered, honored, respected. In life as well as in death. A great man, he. A great man, he was. A great man, he will be. He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His soul had done what it came to do, learned what it came to learn, and then was free to leave.

Senna reached for David's hand. I got up, dragged my chair over, and shoved in between them. This brought a faint nod from Merlin. ~Everworld, Enter the Enchanted

Gloria told Maria the whole story of her adoption by the time she was seven years old. She had adopted Maria after breaking up with a man---a fellow graduate student she would only ever refer to as H---who had wanted her to stand behind him at protests, and type up his dissertation, and serve him dinner and wash the dishes and bear him some children and write her own dissertation in between folding laundry. He'd seemed attracted to her in direct proportion to how well she disappeared into their backdrop. Gloria was in her midthirties then and just beginning her graduate program. She knew there were many black babies languishing in the system, unwanted. She put in a request for a healthy black infant girl. It was only a few months before she got a call from the agency saying they had one available. The baby was only a few weeks old and her name was Maria. She came from the Cane River in Louisiana. They didn't have much more information than that except that she was in the care of a Catholic orphanage now----the Saint Ann's Infant and Maternity Home in Maryland. Gloria dropped everything and drove eight hours to collect her child.

We learn in school that the civil rights movement was about overcoming segregation. But as my father has pointed out to me, what an oddly neutral word - segregation to describe what was happening in this country. We prefer it to more blunt descriptions of that social arrangement: subjugation, oppression. And perhaps, also, we don't want to acknowledge the ways in which we were not segregated at all, the ways in which the lives of black and white people have always been intertwined at the most intimate level. Slavery was intimate. Oppression is so often an act of intimacy.

She is beginning to understand that completion is not so much about reaching perfection as it is making the choice to look away from the material. What was it Khalil used to say when she couldn’t finish a paper in college? Be a

something—to make something right and final—is to kill it.

Every few years, in the world of sport, someone ascends to the most rarefied of all levels—the one at which it becomes news not when they win, but when they lose. It must have been like that in the early Fifties, when a tubby Italian called Alberto Ascari was stitching together nine Grand Prix wins in a row, a record not even Fangio, Clark or Senna could match. Or when the great Real Madrid side of Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas won the first five European Cup finals, between 1956 and 1960. Or when Martina Navratilova dominated Wimbledon's Centre Court, winning nine ladies' singles titles in thirteen years. The current Australian cricket team is in just such a run at present, having just completed nine consecutive victories, putting them four wins away from establishing an all-time record. And then there is Tiger Woods.

Escrevo como um cidadão brasileiro, igual a todos os demais, que foi empapado com a cultura brasileira, que torceu em muitas Copas do Mundo de Futebol e como um brasileiro que assistiu nosso Ayrton Senna da Silva dar a última volta na pista empunhando a bandeira brasileira após vencer mais uma corrida.

My father's subject: the relationship between history and the individual. He believes everybody is an 'excretion' of his or her environment. That's the word he uses. Excretion.

Il casco nasconde sentimenti che non possono essere compresi.

I earned good money,’ he said. ‘I was driving in good teams, I was winning races, I had pole positions … basically, not a lot to prove. So what is the point to take still the risk? That was my question to myself last week. But the other side is, what is the rest of your life?

Senna’s case was not why did he crash or who was to blame, but why

She is beginning to understand that completion is not so much about reaching perfection as it is making the choice to look away from the material. What was it Khalil used to say when she couldn’t finish a paper in college? Be a completionist, not a perfectionist.

She is beginning to understand that completion is not so much about reaching perfection as it is making the choice to look away from the material. What was it Khalil used to say when she couldn't finish a paper in college? Be a completionist, not a perfectionist. Gloria was a perfectionist. It wasn't that she didn't have the stamina to finish her dissertation on Zora Neale Hurston and the triple consciousness of black women protagonists; it was that she could not tear herself away from the material. She couldn't bear to leave Janie behind. Because Gloria understood that to finish something–to make something right and final–is to kill it.

Senna once said in an now famous interview, "Being a racing driver means you are racing with other peeople and if you no longer go for a [pass] that exists, you are no longer a racing driver because we are competing - - competing to win and the  main motivation for all of us is to compete for victory, not to come finish 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th.

Jane had accepted his referral and called the special clinic, which, astoundingly, had no openings for many weeks.

stick figure with a big head he called Baby Blue. In the drawings, Baby Blue was always in a situation of danger—standing tiny beneath a dinosaur or at the edge of a cliff—but no matter what, his expression never changed. He wore the same invisible flat smile in every image no matter what terrible thing was about to happen.

Now do you see why I’ve been wanting us to leave the country? Do you see it now? We don’t belong here. This is an illiterate country. Dumb as fuck. It’s a country that turns a blind eye to Black genius.

just too rigid and self-absorbed. They needed to learn how to compromise in the ways that were necessary to sustain a marriage.

in which he was requesting asylum from American racism, as if that were something on offer.

Jane hung up and called her sister, who told her their mother was full of white feminist second-wave claptrap, that she’d always cared more about feeding her own ego than feeding her half-caste children.

One of the strange parts of being a teacher was how it made time seem to stand still. If you didn't look in the mirror, you could almost trick yourself into thinking that time wasn't passing because your students kept staying the same young age year after year. You could fail to notice that you, nevertheless, were getting older.

Sure. Those bottles were a little out of our price range, babe.” “Brett’s gonna kill me,” Jane said, half to herself. “No, he won’t. Dude’s got money to burn. Remember? He’ll call his wine guy. Rich people love having their shit stolen because it gives them something new to buy. That

Sacra repacked her kit, each item in its place. “This isn’t about Joshen. This is about you. If you’re not strong enough without him, you’ll never be strong enough with him.” Leaning forward, she rested her hand on Senna’s arm. “You owe it to him, to yourself, to become the woman you’re meant to be.

I think the narcolepsy is adorable. Someday you'll be happy for these little lulls. Who the fuck wants a man to be awake all the time?

We are all children, aren’t we. The difference between the man and the children is only the toys. As you grow up you start to have more things to think, more things to worry about and you lose it. So it is important when you have the opportunity to have the place to go back a little bit like a child, so you can recycle your mind a little bit. Just slow down and enjoy life, like children do. They do not think about tomorrow, they do not think about next year or next month, they think about right now. They just see a game and they try to play that game right now. It doesn’t matter an hour ahead, they do not think an hour ahead, so they enjoy completely life and its full potential.

அறம் ஒரு மெய்மைவட்டம். அதற்குள் நின்றால் மட்டுமே அது பொருள்கொள்கிறது. வெளியே சென்றுவிட்டவர்களுக்கு பித்தென்றும் அறிவின்மை என்றும் அன்றி அது பொருள்படாது

Wasn’t it ironic, she said, how women spent their twenties trying to catch a man and have his babies, then spent the next decade wishing they could escape through a bathtub drain? Settling down was just a euphemism for inching toward death. Death was the ultimate form of settling down. She said Jane should pine to create great art instead because, in the end, men were letdowns and kids were disappointments who grew up—like Jane and her sister—to blame their mothers for everything. Only art and friendship remained.

Her kind of poverty was the loneliest kind, the least dignified kind, because her parents had chosen it. They had picked poetry over profit.

She too had parents who were overeducated and underpaid—it was the worst combination. They had raised her and her sister in a ghetto of artists and poets, guaranteeing that they would be alienated from rich children and poor children alike, thanks to a cultural and political vocabulary that suggested

class and privilege without actual class and privilege—gauche caviar without the actual caviar.

Still, Jane didn’t think Lilith had done so badly in the game of life. Which meant that Jane’s karma, if not quite clean, was drinkable.

Like any Black Gen Xer, she hadn’t had time to worry about microaggressions, what with all the good old-fashioned macroaggressions she’d experienced: white kids throwing rocks at her head, white kids calling her father “nigger” with impunity, white kids leaving bananas on her family’s porch when they moved into the neighborhood.

You mean Stepin Fetchit?” he said. And she’d snorted, pretended to think it was funny and let it go. Because marriage was all about letting those little moments go.

She’d always disliked the Buddhist saying, “The obstacle is the path.” Or maybe it was that she hated the people who said it, smiling tightly as she pushed deeper into Downward Dog.

Jane had no such urge to leave the country. In her decidedly unscientific sampling, all the Black people who left the country in their desperate quest to “escape the American obsession with race” only became more obsessed with race themselves. Or rather, became obsessed with not being obsessed with race. Once you declared you didn’t believe in race, it seemed, you had to declare this rather banal idea everywhere you went—so it became a way of believing in race even as you pretended not to believe in race. It was an “out damn spot” situation—the more you tried to wash your hands of race, the more the bloody spots emerged.

She finds her old cheap dress and promised herself to replace it with a new dress, a better dress, very soon. She’d replace everything just as soon as she could.

LA has two faces. By day it was as hopeful and effervescent as a hummingbird, by night it was terrifying, doomed. The flowers could fool you in the daytime. They could make you believe you weren’t floating in outer space. But at night, you knew.

overcome for a moment by a bracing fear. It was her old fear, the one a therapist had once told her she’d been ingrained to feel as a child, the sense that everything good was bound to fail—because, deep down, she did not believe she was entitled to a world that seemed welcoming, warm. Now she did the thing the therapist had told her to do—she pushed past the feeling.

She couldn’t imagine where he’d go. It was after eight. There was nowhere to go in LA after eight unless you planned it a week in advance. It wasn’t like you could drive down the mountain and wander into some party or bar scene.

She didn’t get the appeal of going off the grid. Nothing of interest happened off the grid, and if something of note did happen, it usually involved things best left to the pages of a glossy children’s book—a grizzly bear or a mountain lion or a rattlesnake. Or a serial killer. Also, camping trips seemed like an elaborate excuse to buy expensive equipment you didn’t need—a flagrant display of upper-middle-class white privilege so that you could pretend to live simply.

A man like him wouldn’t hit on a woman like me.” She waited for Lenny to disagree. “True,” he said.

With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.” —AYRTON SENNA

Jane had been in New York for ten years at that point. She’d moved there after college, still believing that her life would unfold in a certain order. First, she would launch her career, then, after a series of difficult but teachable-moment love affairs, she would meet The One—her future mate—and settle down somewhere outside the city where they would spawn beautiful, gifted children. Later, when said children grew up and went to college at a school that looked exceptionally good on a bumper sticker on her Audi, Jane would spend the rest of her days writing novels and tending to her yard in Eileen Fisher clothes, her face set in deep thought like a kind of Pema Chödrön for the biracial set. She would age gracefully as a rich Buddhist.

It's frightening how easy one can become consumed by their own goal and attempt to force it upon others, no matter how noble it may be. But there's nothing wrong with wanting to pursue your own dreams.

E nuotò lungo la Senna fino al Canale della Manica, e la sua bellezza rozza e assurda finì nei dipinti di Matisse e Hopper, di Boitel e Picasso, di Chagall, Heckel e Nolde, tutta gente la cui esistenza Steno ignorava completamente, e sulla spiaggia di Le Havre trattò argomenti biblici con un vecchio generale a cui chiese dei pesci-follia senza ottenere altra risposta che la follia più cieca e innominabile, una follia che non era il colore espressionista di Tilde ma il buio assoluto e contagioso del nazismo, del suicidio, dell’inferno senza ritorno.

Jane’s father once told her that white people believed, deep in their hearts, that Black people would all choose to become white if they could. But Black people didn’t want to be white, he had told her. They only wanted to have what white people had.

They’d lived in the one-room back house in Venice behind the Rwandan genocide scholar who made Jane watch reality dating shows with her at night.

A therapist had once told her that if she had a baby she was going to have to lower her standards. Otherwise, she’d be the only person she felt was good enough to care for her child, and her husband would get away with not helping at all. If you lowered your standards, the therapist told her, you would end up with a coparent who did some things very badly but some things well—and your kids would be better off because they’d have two parents who weren’t resentful and overburdened.

At her age, to be sexually desired by a man who had a personal trainer and an electric Porsche, a man who was served egg-white omelets and smoothies by his beautiful assistant during meetings.

The hunger to be, to persevere. I thought, I’m going to make sure these white people regret the day they ever tried to doubt me. It gave me this balls-to-the-wall urge to succeed. And now I’m running shit. I pay more for my cleaning lady than all those public school administrators make in a year.

Okay, cool. So I walk into this fucking princess-theme party and the Kardashian sisters are out in full force with their enormous inflamed asses on display like goddamn baboons in heat. Looking all King magazine but white.

This is about the universe. And trust me, you don’t want to fuck with the universe because that bitch has no mercy.

The mothers were the demographic that peppered this mountaintop—formerly hot moms, formerly hip moms, formerly ambitious moms—white women now over forty, slightly diminished but still wanting more. Rapacious white women.

LA could be such a chameleon. It could be anything you wanted it to be.

every story needed an inciting incident, when the character’s flawed but stable reality was destabilized and they were forced on the journey that would teach them who they really needed to be, maybe the call from Honor was that inciting incident.

The public school teachers, they tried to break me,” he said. “From the moment I started school they tried to crush my spirit. They tried to shame me and pathologize me. An army of white women, sometimes men, who literally thought it was their job to destroy Black boys. They sent me to the principal’s office every day for no reason except I couldn’t sit on my own little square on the carpet. I was always trying to mess with other kids. Normal little boy hijinks, you know? Pulling this girl’s hair, giving that boy a wedgie. Nothing criminal. But when you’re a little Black boy, that’s what they do. They try to find a way to pathologize your ordinary fucking behavior. To get you in that pipeline. They really want to put you onto that track, you know, a life working at McDonald’s or hard crime. Your pick. And I think that’s what made me Hampton Motherfucking Ford. All that time spent in the principal’s office and detention. That’s where I discovered the fire that was inside me. The hunger to be, to persevere. I thought, I’m going to make sure these white people regret the day they ever tried to doubt me.

And their children, and their different ways of loving them—hers with fear, Lenny’s with his steely masculine confidence that all was well. They had nearly died under the weight of that love. Because having children, she thought, was like a suicide pact.

To the Huntington Botanical Gardens, for the space and silence to work.

Money—real money—was what they needed now. It would finish the story. It would give meaning to all the struggle of the past ten years. And money would give Lenny the time and space he needed to make his art. The thing about being a woman, a mother, a wife, was that if you wanted to be any more than those things you had to hire another wife. Somebody had to be the wife in a family. Rich women got to pay somebody else to be them—a stunt double to make it look like they were doing everything well when, in fact, they were doing only the fun parts. Money would grant her the help and the home she needed to raise her children and to do what she wanted to do, which was to tell stories—and age richly. That too.

On the shelves, the stalwart anthologies of all those slightly banal stories she found so easy to teach. Genius, she’d learned, didn’t teach as well as mere competence, where the mechanics were all visible on the surface. You couldn’t teach a student how to write by assigning Toni Morrison, it would only create bad imitations. Next to the anthologies were

Brett had once been, like Jane, a writer of that most doomed of genres, literary fiction.

Make it worse,

She had in recent years begun to assign only minimalist autofiction by queer POC authors to her undergraduates, and she had to admit it was a better classroom experience for all.

You want to know how you get rich in LA? You don’t stop.

Este libro es un sátira sobre el amor, la ambición, el fracaso, la reinvención y como sobre se construyen y manipulan las identidades raciales en la industria del entretenimiento, y como las personas birraciales tiene que negociar su identidad en una sociedad que todo el tiempo está buscando etiquetarlas o representarlas de manera estereotipada y simplificada.

There’s so much desperation in selling your own work. You have to cultivate a persona to hawk a product that, let’s be real, nobody really wants. You have to be multicultural and wise. Be somebody with a position. You have to tweet increasingly inflammatory things about your vagina just so people will buy your book. A book nobody wanted or needed in the first place. Because they already have TV.

Like, Stormi. She’s going to be the most normal one. She’s the one who will be happy. And Chicago, she’s the tough one. She’ll persevere. She inherited her mother’s steely reserve. She’s going to own the whole family someday. Own them. And North. She’s going to always be who she is right now—ruining Christmas photo shoots from here to eternity.

she’d assigned a story that used the second person—that gimmicky “you” point of view. She thought the students would love it because it was so minimalist, but they said they felt oppressed by the second person. They had not been asked for their consent to be the protagonist of the story.

There’s a difference,” Dennis used to say, “between a story and a situation. And what you have is a situation. It still needs a story.” Or “Without an inciting incident, there is no story.” Or “A novel begins with a character in a stable but flawed life—an unhappy marriage, a dead-end job. The novel hinges on the inciting incident—something to destabilize your character’s life in the first thirty pages.

The obstacle is the path.

Jane’s father once told her that white people believed, deep in their hearts, that Black people would all choose to become white if they could. But Black people didn’t want to be white, he had told her. They only wanted to have what white people had. He had said race was always about money, and money was always about race.

Also, camping trips seemed like an elaborate excuse to buy expensive equipment you didn’t need—a flagrant display of upper-middle-class white privilege so that you could pretend to live simply.