Williams Esquinaldo

“they’re teaching us that the real Catholic belief about Mary is that she got pregnant through her ear—that “Just as Eve listened to Satan and gave birth to sin, so Mary listened to Gabriel and became pregnant with the Son of God.”
― Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, Dodging Satan: My Irish/Italian, Sometimes Awesome, But Mostly Creepy, Childhood

“Stop it!’ The girl jumped out of her chair, ‘Stop torturing me! Stop pretending you didn’t know each other, you planned all this, and then you waited for a wet day and then he was going to come in and then there is this story, and then he’d send the photos off, stop it! Leave me alone!’ She rushed to the door and tore it open and vanished down the hotel stairs.”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“It is said that in those days one could hear seventy languages in the streets of Istanbul. The vast Ottoman Empire, shrunken and weakened though it now was, had made it normal and natural for Greeks to inhabit Egypt, Persians to settle in Arabia and Albanians to live with Slavs. Christians and Muslims of all sects, Alevis, Zoroastrians, Jews, worshippers of the Peacock Angel, subsisted side by side in the most improbable places and combinations. There were Muslim Greeks, Catholic Armenians, Arab Christians and Serbian Jews. Istanbul was the hub of this broken-felloed wheel, and there could be found epitomised the fantastical bedlam and babel, which although no one realised it at the time, was destined to be the model and precursor of all the world's great metropoles a hundred years hence, by which time Istanbul itself would, paradoxically, have lost its cosmopolitan brilliance entirely. It would be destined, perhaps, one day to find it again, if only the devilish false idols of nationalism, that specious patriotism of the morally stunted, might finally be toppled in the century to come.”
― Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings