Brian Bodel

“Every day so lovely, shining,
up and down, the Sultan’s daughter
walked at evening by the water,
where the white fountain splashes.

Every day the young slave stood
by the water, in the evening,
where the white fountain splashes,
each day growing pale and paler.

Then the princess came one evening,
quickly speaking to him, softly,
‘Your true name – I wish to know it,
your true homeland and your nation.’

And the slave said, ‘I am called
Mahomet, I am from Yemen,
and my tribe, it is the Asra,
who die, when they love.”
― Heinrich Heine

“Sam's doctor said to him, "The good news is that the pain is in your head."
But I am in my head, Sam thought.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“You couldn't be old and still be wrong about as many things as she'd been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“I know, too, that Matteo held on to Jelka’s rosary beads as we rocketed upward, as we moved up from darkness into further dark, the light so many miles above our heads. I know all this, and I know that as my head cleared, finally, of everything, sunken thoughts receding with the thing that we had left below, I thought to myself Miri Miri Miri and I waited for the ocean to end.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea