Isabel J

“We live in an environment of banality. For most people, that's enough. But how do you get through? How do you rip off that coating of banality? You have to make people descend into the depths of themselves.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“Conditioned by the position of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“It took me a long time to understand that she wasn't being incoherent or contradictory, but rather that it was I myself, arrogant class renegade that I was, who tried to force her discourse into a foreign kind of coherence, one more compatible with my values—that incoherence appears to exist only when you fail to reconstruct the logic that lies behind any given discourse or practice. I came to understand that many different forms of discourse intersected in my mother and spoke through her, that she was constantly torn between her shame at not having finished school and her pride that even so, as she would say, she'd 'made it through and had a bunch of beautiful kids,' and that these two modes of discourse existed only in relation to each other.”
― Édouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule