Debbie Foster

I didn't know if it was my mind, the writing, or what, but I had trouble following the sentences. They moved strangely, like they were bent somewhere inside, the assertions like staircases that I followed into walls.

The means by which the latent content of a dream is disguised Freud termed the 'dream work'. He identified several mechanisms. Condensation or 'compression' occurs when two or more images are combined without loss of meaning or implication. A figure might appear, for example, who is simultaneously the sleeper's mother and wife. Displacement occurs

There's a membrane between imagining God's love as a thought experiment and experiencing it as absolute reality, and if you slip across it, the entire known universe shatters and reassembles itself to be more whole and beautiful than you thought was possible. I had forgotten.

…believing in the naturalness of your mother tongue shows a lack of serious engagement with language and belies the entire premise of modern literature. This is why I believe that existing outside of one's mother tongue is not exceptional, but simply an extreme version of the normal state of things.

Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don't entirely exist and the feelings and

A central tenet of Buddhism is that the self is illusory. We are more than our conscious minds and we are wrong to think of our autobiographical self as a 'true self'. Freud's 'ego' is also illusory, insofar as it generates a misleadingly comprehensive sense of selfhood, whereas in reality it is only a small part of a much larger, opaque totality.

She stepped back and examined its scale. Space evoked emotion in the same way an open landscape squeezed a heart. It set the mind to wonder, gave reverence to things beyond the self.

… even when supposedly conveying an objective reality, people become storytellers, and which stories they tell depends on the groups to which they belong.

When you are immersed in a foreign language for several years and are taking in a new language system, part of the theoretical basis for your mother tongue breaks down, changes form, and a new self is born. Some writers strongly dislike this immigrant condition, in which one's "original self" gets broken down.