emma ↟

“This is to assuage our conscience, darling" she would explain to Blanca. "But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need charity; they need justice.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously . . . And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand [its] existence . . . It would be difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages . . .”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero