Carmen

“Those people who are buried next to each other are perhaps not as crazy as one might think. Their ashes might press and mix together, and unite. What do I know? Maybe they haven't lost all feeling or all the memories of their first state. Perhaps there is a flicker of heat that they both enjoy in their own way at the bottom of the cold urn that holds them. Oh, my Sophie, I could touch you, feel you, love you, look for you, unite myself with you, and combine myself with you when we are no longer here.. Allow me this fantasy.”
― Denis Diderot

“I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can’t picture. Sometimes, even now, I look on the married girls the way a wild dog might look through the window at tame ones, envying the regularity of their lives but also despising the low pleasure they get from the master’s touch.”
― Louise Erdrich

“You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the other person using it to assert his strength.”
― Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950

“Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a "scientific" hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. "Reason" became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.”
― Adam Gopnik