Sophia Mughal

“Now, it seems to me, Mr. Meis, that we ourselves are now living in one of those periods of transition.  Doubt, confusion, perplexity on every hand. All the great beacons darkened! All the landmarks gone! Whom shall we follow? Which way shall we go? Backwards, perhaps? Shall we gather about the little lamps we find hanging to the gravestones of our illustrious dead? Do you remember what Niccolo Tommaseo said in one of his poems—a good poet was Tommaseo, in spite of his dictionary—that the flame in his lantern was not big enough perhaps to set the world on fire, but that it still might serve for greater men than he to light their wicks from?”
― Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal

“Unlike you, he had no past to bind him and no future to constrain him.”
― Éric Chacour, Ce que je sais de toi

“It's this way: when you're really wise, you say: 'I mustn't do this,' or 'I mustn't do that—otherwise ... I'll be putting my foot in it.' Very well, you discover, sooner or later, that life itself means putting one foot in after another; and the man who never made a fool of himself is the man who never really lived; and there you are!”
― Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal / Novelle per un anno / I vecchi e i giovani

“This was your first intimate acquaintance with bereavement. You came to know the diffuse feeling of being outside yourself, almost dissociated from your own body, as if the mind refused to inflict on the body a pain it could never withstand.”
― Éric Chacour, Ce que je sais de toi