Erica ♡

“I’ve been thinking that you are my country. Is that a strange thing to say? Without you, I don’t have a home in this world; I am a felled tree, my roots severed all round; you can topple me with the touch of a finger.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“THE FIRE That winter it seemed the city was always burning — night after night the flames leaped, the ladders pitched forward. Scorched but alive, the homeless wailed as they ran for the cold streets. That winter my mind had turned around, shedding, like leaves, its bolts of information — drilling down, through history, toward my motionless heart. Those days I was willing, but frightened. What I mean is, I wanted to live my life but I didn’t want to do what I had to do to go on, which was: to go back. All winter the fires kept burning, the smoke swirled, the flames grew hotter. I began to curse, to stumble and choke. Everything, solemnly, drove me toward it — the crying out, that’s so hard to do. Then over my head the red timbers floated, my feet were slippers of fire, my voice crashed at the truth, my fists smashed at the flames to find the door — wicked and sad, mortal and bearable, it fell open forever as I burned.”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

“But not everyone needs to be a warrior, my dear. Otherwise we’d never have poets, artists, scientists …’ ‘I disagree,’ said Defne into her wine glass. ‘There are moments in life when everyone has to become a warrior of some kind. If you are a poet, you fight with your words; if you are an artist, you fight with your paintings … But you can’t say, “Sorry, I’m a poet, I’ll pass.” You don’t say that when there’s so much suffering, inequality, injustice.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory