She could not move until the first lights of dawn appeared. Only then did she slide back into her bed, feeling within her the silence of the entire world. Silence filled her utterly.
“Absolute power, which denies this right of appeal, is purely and simply incompatible with a Civil Society; and Divine Right, which Catholic teachers are always insisting upon, entirely fails to justify the contention that any one man may control the lives and destinies of all the rest. Power should be controlled, and divided, as in Great Britain, into legislative and executive. If the executive power failed to act in accordance with the purposes for which it was set up, if it encroached upon the liberties of the people, it must be taken out of the hands of the person wielding”
― The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680-1715
― The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680-1715
“In a dizzying shift of perspective, Rune suddenly feels he has become the leper: it’s Rune who looks out through scarred, opaque corneas; Rune who sees cloudy, smeared images with no edges; Rune who discerns light and shadow but remembers what it was like to have moonlight fall on his face; those are Rune’s misshapen, ulcerated feet wrapped in bloodied gunnysack that is secured with coir rope . . . The moment passes. He has no explanation for what just happened, the sense of being momentarily embodied in another.”
― The Covenant of Water
― The Covenant of Water
“Love is always partly a misunderstanding’;”
― Oscar: A Biography
― Oscar: A Biography
“You can transform your nation into a prison because you are committed to an ideology.”
― No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life
― No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life
“Outside, the fields were shaking off their sleep and the first rays of sunlight were cutting the peaks of the cordillera like the thrusts of a saber, warming up the earth and evaporating the dew into a fine white foam that blurred the edges of things and turned the landscape into an enchanted dream. Blanca set off in the direction of the river. Everything was still quiet. Her footsteps crushed the fallen leaves and the dry branches, producing a light crunching sound, the only noise in that vast sleeping space. She felt that the shaggy meadows, the golden wheatfields, and the far-off purple mountains disappearing in the clear morning sky were part of some ancient memory, something she had seen before exactly like this, as if she had already lived this moment in some previous life. The delicate rain of the night had soaked the earth and trees, and her clothing felt slightly damp, her shoes cold. She inhaled the perfume of the drenched earth, the rotten leaves, and the humus, which awakened an unknown pleasure in all her senses.”
― The House of the Spirits
― The House of the Spirits
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