Subrita Thakur Chakraborty

“It was dark in the corridor; they were standing near a light. For a minute they looked silently at each other. Razumikhin remembered that minute all his life. Raskolnikov's burning and fixed look seemed to grow more intense every moment, penetrating his soul, his consciousness. All at once Razumikhin gave a start. Something strange seemed to pass between them . . . as if the hint of some idea, something horrible, hideous, flitted by and was suddenly understood on both sides . . . Razumikhin turned pale as a corpse.
"You understand now?”
― Dostoevesky, Crime et Châtiment

“After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foilage.

"There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“There were people who loved me,
There were people I loved.
Today I blushed
Because of who I once was.

I felt ashamed
Of being, here and now,
The one who always dreams
And never steps out,

Ashamed of realizing
That I can have no more
Than this dream of what
I could have been - before.

6 August 1934”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“It happens all the time to you fortunate literate
people: A maiden who can't read begs you to read a love letter she's received. The letter is so surprising, exciting and disturbing that its owner, though embarrassed at your becoming privy to her most intimate affairs, ashamed and distraught, asks you all the same to read it once more. You read it again, In the end, you've read the letter so many times that both of you have memorized it. Before long, she'll take the letter in her hands and ask, "Did he make that statement there?" and "Did he say that here?" As you point to the appropriate places, she'll pore over those passages, still unable to make sense of the words there. As she stares at the curvy letters of the words, sometimes I am so moved I forget that I myself can't read or write and feel the urge to embrace those illiterate maidens whose tears fall to the page.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red