Chuma

“He had always been thin, but there he was reduced to nothing but skin and bones. His skin was burned by the unrelenting sun, salt, and sand, his features sharpened: he was a Giacometti sculpture in cast iron.”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“Victor's nephew was plump and bald: all babies that age looked like Winston Churchill to him.”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you're always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you're forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don't take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it's as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren't hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People