Raphael Hanna

“In the small and the insignificant - that's where life hides, that's where it builds its nest.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow

“I understood, vividly, the frustration of the revolutionary who wanted to sweep the whole mess out of existence and begin again. I understood the despair of the young, who wanted to drop out, like the Poverello of Assisi, and live in fraternal simplicity on cannabis and corn-bread. I understood the seductive illusion of dictatorship: that one messianic man armed with plenary power could impose order and unity with a wave of his sceptre. More slowly, I began to see Bruno Manzini's belief that we were all prisoners of our genes and our history and that our future was written by scribes long perished.”
― Morris L. West, The Salamander

“A new conviction was crystallizing out of the murky fluid of my own thoughts. There was no cure for the human condition because every man read the present and plotted the future in the light of his own past. There was no such thing as a clean start, because no one truly forgave and no one wholly forgot. In the end, the folk memory betrayed us all. The wrongs of the fathers were revenged on the children.”
― Morris L. West, The Salamander

“Even if you weren't born in Versailles, Athens, Rome, or Paris, the sublime will always find a form in which to appear before you. If you haven't read Pseudo Longinus, haven't heard of Kant, or if you inhabit the eternal, illiterate fields of anonymous villages and towns, of empty days and nights, the sublime will reveal itself to you in your own language.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow