Natalie

“So, the women he's loved. Who knew nothing of satisfaction. Who having gotten what they wanted always promptly wanted more. Not greedy. Never greedy... They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.

They were dreamer-women.

Very dangerous women.

Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, "brutal, senseless," etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become.

So, insatiable women.

Un-pleasable women.

Who wanted above all things that could not be had. Not what THEY could not have--no such thing for such women--but what wasn't there to be had in the first place.”
― Taiye Selasi, Ghana Must Go

“It was the theologian St. Augustine of Hippo who, thousands of years ago, said something about man’s natural tendency to seek divine worship. There is a hole, so to say, that God created for Himself in man’s soul that man tries to fill with everything else before he found rest by coming back to the creator. It is, apparently, what makes men fanatics, apologists, heroes or traitors, saints or heretics, politicians, soccer hooligans, or martyrs. [St. Augustine didn’t appear too concerned with women’s holes. But one must assume they have it too, and were perhaps preoccupied with trying to survive in a man’s world to ask questions, to write books, to start wars in an attempt to fill it]”
― Lemlem Tilahun, Virgins Always Bleed:

“Her life had been altogether artificial; she had always been a great garden lily in a hot-house, she had never known what it was to be blown by a fresh breeze on a sun-swept moorland like a heather flower. The hot-house shelters from all chills and is full of perfume, but you can see no horizon from it; that alone is the joy of the moorland.”
― Ouida

“And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children