the rhythm of running moves like a heartbeat

"We're not usually given the insight to know when we're running through the core of our life; usually it's years later when we look back and say, "Oh!" But I was lucky enough to know it, and hope, when I'm dying, I'll be lucky enough to remember it. The rhythm of running moves like a heartbeat, first one foot and then the other, like the pulse, deep thrust out, kick back of the veins, the twin beat that is music before there was music, löparglädje the Scandinavian distance runners called it, translates into English as "the joy of running," but it means life."

from Running by Keith Maillard

They wanted so much, our mothers.

"They wanted so much, our mothers. I think about it sometimes. I don't know how they did it. They wanted their lives back but still felt responsible for ours.

I miss having her to talk to, there's so much I'd ask. She was a secretary in a private school and I think of the paperwork and the staples, the dry air and the paycheque and the feel of a day's work behind her and how much she must have wanted it. I don't think my father liked it. But men get as much without judgement. Or so it seems when you're not a man, and you watch them pass freely from the breakfast table to their cars in the morning. It look so easy. Of course it's not, it's not easy for anyone. But it's harder for a woman, the costs are physical. Men don't feel the pain of possibilities in the same way, the permanence of choice. At the end of her life, bed-bound by illness, my mother said to me, Don't let anyone tell you you can have everything. You can't. A woman has to choose."

from Into That Darkness by Steven Price

this ridiculous and unworthy measure of literary value

"I believe that when W.G. Sebald makes reference to a historical event of which we are ignorant, we readers know that the lack is ours. But that is not true when we approach writers who engage with Lebanon, Sri Lanka, China or even our own First Nations history. Those writers are expected to be the explainers, interpreters, educators, spokespeople. Their literature is partly judged by their ability to balance all these roles: their literary success depends on the success of “our” education. Isn’t it time to laugh, uproariously, at this ridiculous and unworthy measure of literary value?

The world is large. As readers, let us grow into it."

from Madeleine Thien's essay in the Globe and Mail about Ma Jian's The Dark Road.

See my virility!

"I wore my fatigue with pride. At last I had earned the right to be grizzled unshaven dad picking up my caffe latte of a morning, my marsupial baby cradled in the sling, giving the wife a few minutes' rest. See my virility! I'd often envied these fellows at the local coffee shop, picking up a standing ovation along with their bag of almond croissants. Now it was my turn to share the glory, to feel the love."

from the brilliant Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins