Elly

“Was I wilfully blind when I married Michael? Of course I was. I knew about his heart condition - everyone did. But I fell in love with him and decided it didn't matter. We were going to live for ever, somehow. Now I know that the fact that we had the same initials, were both expatriates, had gone to the same university, and were of medium build made the relationship highly determined. But I might have done the research and discovered his short life expectancy or talked to psychologists about the pain of grieving or read books about the sadness of widowhood. But I didn't do any of those things. I looked away from those sad certainties and pretended that they weren't there.
Love is blind, not, as in mythology, because Cupid's arrows are random but because, once struck by them, we are left blind. When we love someone, we see them as smarter, wittier, prettier, stronger than anyone else sees them.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships.”
― Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized

“To be sure, the church has greatly assisted the colonialist; backing his ventures, helping his conscience, contributing to the acceptance of colonization even by the colonized.”
― Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized

“Funny how my heart races
funny how my breathing paces
funny with just soft whispers
in a sea of strangers
we make love
without ever touching
two breathless bodies
in a crowded room”
― Tyler Kent White