Sundus Alfi

“She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman... impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.

(On Emily Brontë)”
― Constantin Heger

“There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its painting, I haven't read its books... I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“By the time we know ourselves, we are already. That is the problem of childhood. It takes you a couple of years to grow up, to be conscious, to make decisions, and by then it's already too late, it's just a race against those fateful years.”
― Yasmin Zaher, The Coin

“What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question - why i thus suffered; now, at the distance of -- I will not say how many years -- I see it clearly.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre