Stephanie Niu

“Here is where the modern cult of love enters: it is the main way in which we test ourselves for strength of feeling, and find ourselves deficient.”
― Susan Sontag

“People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for your to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boreing way there was.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“The empire is being crushed by its own weight,” Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves’ veins, cities lined like a hand’s palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words. The descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.”
― Italo Calvino; translated by William Weaver