Mirna Lopus

“That day I vowed to myself that I would never, ever again give that bitch the satisfaction of hearing me beg her to stop beating me.”
― Dave Pelzer, My Story: "A Child Called It", "The Lost Boy", "A Man Named Dave"

“Now, when their glances met, they understood one another. The power that lay within both their souls had met, and, as it were, clasped hands. They accepted one another's sacrifice. Hers, mayhap, was the more complete of the two, because for her his absence would mean weary waiting, the dull heartache so terrible to bear.”
― Baroness Emma Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

“Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The second creation, the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the organism was an intoxication, a heightening and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was nothing but the next step on the reckless path of the spirit dishonored; nothing but the automatic blush of matter roused to sensation and become receptive for that which awaked it.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Brackets come in various shapes, types and names:
1 round brackets (which we call brackets, and the Americans call parentheses)
2 square brackets [which we call square brackets, and the Americans call brackets]”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation