Elçin Arabacı

“What under heaven do you want with a daughter of the bourgeoisie? Leave them alone. Pick out some great, wanton flame of a woman, who laughs at life and jeers at death and loves one while she may. There are such women, and they will love you just as readily as any pusillanimous product of bourgeois sheltered life. There are such women, and they will love you just as readily as any pusillanimous product of bourgeois sheltered life.

Pusillanimous?” Martin protested.
“Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have been prattled into them, and afraid to live life. They will love you, Martin, but they will love their little moralities more. What you want is the magnificent abandon of life, the great free souls, the blazing butterflies and not the little gray moths. Oh, you will grow tired of them, too, of all the female things, if you are unlucky enough to live. But you won’t live. You won’t go back to your ships and sea; therefore, you’ll hang around these pest-holes of cities until your bones are rotten, and then you’ll die.”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

“All my life people have thought I was too clever. Too clever by half, they’d say. That’s exactly why they don’t pity me. Because they think I am too smart, too knowing to get caught up in this by accident. But Sigga is dumb, and pre-y, and young, and that is why they dont want to see her die.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“- You, Inglés, who know nothing about women. Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.

...

- Thou art not ugly.”



- Qué no? Don’t lie to me. Or,” she laughed the deep laugh. “Has it begun to work with thee? No. That is a joke. No. Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind him, and blind yourself. Then one day, for no reason, he sees you ugly as you really are and he is not blind any more and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling. Do you understand, guapa?”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I am telling the history of very simple people, who had never had any illuminating doubts as to personal integrity and honor.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss