Mutasim Billah

“For me the autumn has never been a sad season. The dead leaves and the increasingly shorter days have never suggested the end of anything, but rather an expectation of the future. In paris, there is an electricity in the air in october evenings at nightfall. Even when it is raining. i do not feel low at that hour of the day, nor do i have the sense of time flying by. i have the impression that everything is possible. the year begins in the month of october.”
― Patrick Modiano, Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue

“I did not speak," continued Pavel, "about that good and gracious God in whom you believe, but about the God with whom the priests threaten us as with a stick, about the God in whose name they want to force all of us to the evil will of the few.”
― Maxim Gorky, Mother

“Was it really my own, that image glimpsed in a flash? Am I really like that, from the outside, when—all the while living—I do not think of myself? For others, then, I am that stranger whom I surprised in a mirror; I am he and not the I whom I know; I am that one there whom I myself at first, upon becoming aware of him, did not recognize. I am that stranger whom I am unable to see living except like that, in a thoughtless second. A stranger whom others alone can see and know, not I.”
― Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

“Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.”
― Robert Galbraith, Lethal White