Gretchen Stolly

“Two decades of virtually uninterrupted fighting had made even the most dignified structures appear drunken, wounded, or lost. The entire city seemed to affirm the notion that warfare is a disease.”
― Greg Mortenson, Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“Much of [John Hanning] Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of Nile is devoted to descriptions of the physical and moral ugliness of Africa's "primitive races," in whose condition he found "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures." For his text, Speke took the story in Genesis 9, which tells how Noah, when he was just six hundred years old and had safely skippered his ark over the flood to dry land, got drunk and passed out naked in his tent. On emerging from his oblivion, Noah learned that his youngest son, Ham, had seen him naked; that Ham had told his brothers, Shem and Japheth, of the spectacle; and that Shem and Japheth had, with their backs chastely turned, covered the old man with a garment. Noah responded by cursing the progeny of Ham's son, Canaan, saying, "A slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers." Amid the perplexities of Genesis, this is one of the most enigmatic stories, and it has been subjected to many bewildering interpretations--most notably that Ham was the original black man. To the gentry of the American South, the weird tale of Noah's curse justified slavery, and to Spake and his colonial contemporaries it spelled the history of Africa's peoples. On "contemplating these sons of Noah," he marveled that "as they were then, so they appear to be now.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“Apenas se deviam ler os livros que nos picam e que nos mordem. Se o livro que lemos não nos desperta como um murro no crânio, para quê lê-lo?”
― F. Kafka