Renee

“The past was always there, lurking in the corners, winking at you when you thought you'd moved on, hanging on to your organs from the inside.”
― Marjan Kamali , The Stationery Shop

“Those who write the rules rarely suffer their weight.”
― Mick Herron, Spook Street

“There was between 1821 and 1913 a prolonged and atrocious holocaust which we have chosen to forget, and from which we have learned absolutely nothing. In 1821, between 26 March and Easter Sunday, in the name of liberty, the southern Greek Christians tortured and
massacred 15,000 Greek Muslim civilians, looted their possessions, and burned their dwellings. The Greek hero Kolokotronis boasted without qualm that so many were the corpses that his horse’s hooves never had to touch the
ground between the town gates of Athens and the citadel. In the Peloponnese, many thousands of Muslims, mainly women and children, were rounded up and butchered. Thousands of shrines and mosques were destroyed, so that even now there are only one or two left in the whole of Greece.”
― Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings

“But instead Samuel says, “Like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves…” And I laugh, startled—because even now—and I say, “As though we were drowning inside our hearts.” Samuel says, faintly, “You Irish.” And then he closes his eyes and continues to breathe.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations