Larisa Onesim

“The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

“am reminded of James Baldwin’s claim that “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
― Azar Nafisi, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times