To live is to exist within time. To remember is to negate time. All of my remembering begins late in the afternoon and lasts late into the night.

∆ Ling Ma, from “Los Angeles,” Bliss Montage: Stories (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022)

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

∆ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

One can’t think without remembering. Rain pours on language too.

∆ Etel Adnan, Sea & Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012)

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

∆ Kate Chopin, from The Awakening