“Why does even the best person hold back something from another? Why not say directly what we feel if we know that what we entrust won’t be scattered to the winds? As it is, everyone looks much tougher than he really is, as if he felt it’d be an insult to his feeling if he expressed them too readily.”
―
―
“I can’t feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.”
― Letters to Milena
― Letters to Milena
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Crime and Punishment
― Crime and Punishment
“I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men, who look like my father pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.”
― Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
― Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
“But the heart has its own memory and I have forgotten nothing.”
― The Fall
― The Fall
lara’s 2024 Year in Books
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