Jasmin Sma

“If you really want to be different, you'd better keep quiet and be a good person on the inside.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“My father was a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue, and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French. Except”
― Assia Djebar, The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories

“After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.”
― Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι

“Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being