The Reader

“Odysseus, son of Laertes, the great traveller, prince of wiles and tricks and a thousand ways. He showed me his scars, and in return let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Here, precisely here, man imitates God: God granted Himself the work of creation, as the highest delight, and He demands that man, too, be a creator of prosperity and the harmonious course of things. And this they call dull!”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“A University degree, four books, and hundreds of articles and I still make mistakes when reading. You wrote me 'good morning' and I read it as 'I love you'.”
― Mahmoud Darwish

“Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate, desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as something fated, inevitable, and foreordained—something bound to happen. Whether by this there is connoted something in the nature of a combination of presentiments, or a great effort of will, or a self-annulment of one's true expectations, and so on, I do not know;”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler