Efi Koitanidou

“It is pure fiction that there is no bridge between one person and another, … On the contrary, what people have in common with each other is much more and of greater importance than what each person has in his own nature and which makes him different from others.'
'That is possible,' I said, 'but what good does it do me to know all this?”
― Hermann Hesse, Gertrude

“When a man’s earning his living doing things he doesn’t like, he feels like a slave; when he’s doing what he loves, he feels like a prince.”
― Isabel Allende, The Infinite Plan

“Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It's a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher's apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand. You can only barely see from that writerly cellar the feet of passers-by, hear the rapping of their heels. Every so often someone stops and bends down and glances in through the window, and then you get a glimpse of a human face, maybe even exchange a few words. But ultimately the mind is so occupied with its own act, a play staged by the self ofr the self in a hasty, makeshift cabinet of curiosities peopled by author and character, narrator and reader, the person describing and the person described, that feet, shoes, heels, and faces become, sooner or later, mere components of that act.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“... that life can't be escaped and must be faced entirely.”
― Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land