Mel

“I looked up then, searched the sky. When I found the moon, I found God, when I saw the stars, I saw God, when I let myself be inhaled by the vast, expanding universe, I understood God the way Seneca once did– God is everything one sees and everything one does not see.”
― Tahereh Mafi, An Emotion of Great Delight: A YA Novel of Muslim American Identity, Grief, and Hope in Post-9/11 America

“In the end, that was the problem with romance. It was so easy to romanticise romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was in falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laugher, shoes lined up together dy the door. Eyes across a dance floor. I could see it all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found nothing was there.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.”
― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black

“Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police