Clara

“I can begin to see the compulsion for admitting original sin, for adoring Hitler, for taking opium. I have long wanted to read and explore the theories of philosophy, psychology, national, religious, & primitive consciousness, but it seems now too late for anything - I am a conglomerate garbage heap of loose ends - selfish, scared, contemplating devoting the rest of my life to a cause - going naked to send clothes to the needy, escaping to a convent, into hypochondria, into religious mysticism, into the waves - anywhere, anywhere, where the burden, the terrifying hellish weight of self-responsibility and ultimate self-judgment is lifted. I can see ahead only into dark, sordid alleys, where the dregs, the sludge, the filth of my life lies, unglorified, unchanged - transfigured by nothing: no nobility, not even the illusion of a dream.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light.”
― James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

“This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason—the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity”—and we also contain the antidote to that disease—courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“Why do we remember what we remember? Which reels from our past assert their vivid selves and which remain dim, just out of reach? I remembered some fleeting encounters so clearly that I wondered if the remembering itself was significant.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count