lua !

“Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemlance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.' - Frankenstein”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband's pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children's skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom? I rise then and go to my herbs. I create something, I transform something. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. This too is good fortune. How many have such power and leisure and defense as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. He sits with me in the greensmelling darkness, holding my hand. Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years. Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean it does not hurt. He does not mean we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“قلْ لي.. لماذا اخترتَني؟
وأخذتَني بيديكَ من بين الأنامْ
ومشيتَ بي..
ومشيتَ.. ثمّ تركتَني
كالطفل يبكي في الزِّحامْ
إن كنتَ - يا مِلحَ المدامعِ - بِعتَني
فأقلّ ما يَرِثُ السكوتُ مِنَ الكلامْ
هُوَ أن تؤشّرَ مِن بعيدٍ بالسلامْ
أن تُغلقَ الأبوابَ إنْ
قررتَ ترحل في الظلامْ
ما ضرَّ لو ودَّعتَنِي؟
ومنحتَني فصلَ الخِتامْ؟
حتى أريحَ يديَّ من
تقليبِ آخر صفحةٍ
من قصّتي..
تلك التي
يشتدُّ أبْيَضُها فيُعميني
إذا اشتدَّ الظلامْ
حتى أنامْ
حتى أنامْ”
― ميسون السويدان

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles