Amelia Smith

“We are sorry, we are sorry.

Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“But formulas are holy as prayers, decree-laws, and dead languages, and not an iota in them can be changed. And so my ammonium chloride, the twin of a happy love and a liberating book, by now completely useless and a bit harmful, is religiously ground into the chromate anti-rust paint on the short of that lake, and nobody knows why anymore.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him alive again on the printed page, especially a man like Sandro. He was not the sort of person you can tell stories about, nor to whom one erects monuments--he who laughed at monuments: he lived completely in his deeds, and when they were over nothing of him remains--nothing but words, precisely.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“Change, I've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays