...our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the profound and unspoken connection between two individuals, acknowledging the mysteries of reality.
In this quote by Nicole Krauss, the author explores the idea of an unspoken bond that can form between strangers through a shared acknowledgment of life's complexities. The 'looks' exchanged signify a deeper understanding of the unseen challenges and emotional depths that exist beyond everyday interactions, suggesting that while we may not fully comprehend these realities, there is a silent recognition of their presence.
In practice
During a poetry reading, one might use this quote to emphasize the theme of shared human experience.
To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.
For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love.
Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
I’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without any effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice.
When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn't an ache but something different.
Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him.
The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.
The recovery of spiritual sight and the healing of physical blindness have much in common. Some of those whose bodily eyes were blind received their sight at once, like the man who heard and immediately saw and was healed. Others recovered their sight gradually as in the case of the man, who, before he was completely cured, said, “I see men as trees, walking”. It is the same with those whose spiritual eyes were healed.
Don’t consent to be hurt and you won’t be hurt – this is a choice over which you have control
A word of the faith that never balks,_x000D_ _x000D_ Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely._x000D_ _x000D_ It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,_x000D_ _x000D_ That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.
We create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about us and others. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us. So we have had poor people around us. If we had believed that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have created appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.
What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
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