Aleksandra

“His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat. After the terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who’d escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiance! That night at the opera comes back to me even now… the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood.
I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I’d never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.”
― Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

“Nekoliko stotina godina posle tog događaja uhvaćene su na obalama Kaspijskog mora dve kornjače na kojima su bile ispisane poruke. Poruka jedne žene i jednog čoveka koji su se voleli. Kornjače su još uvek išle zajedno i na njima su se mogle pročitati poruke zaljubljenih.
Muška poruka je glasila:

Ti si kao ona devojka koja nikad nije ustajala rano, pa kad se udala u susedno selo i prvi put morala rano ustati, ugledala slanu na poljima i rekla svekrvi: ovo u našem selu nema! Tako kao ona, i ti misliš da na svetu nema ljubavi, jer nikada nisi bila budna dovoljno rano da je sretneš, mada je ona svakog jutra tu na vreme...

Ženska poruka bila je kraća, od samo nekoliko reči:

Moj zavičaj je tišina, moja hrana ćutanje. Sedim u svome imenu kao veslač u čamcu. Ne mogu da zaspim koliko te mrzim.”
― Milorad Pavić

“I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“My friend tugged her husband’s arm with both hands. She used all her strength, and I who knew her thoroughly felt that if she could she would have wrenched it from his body, crossed the room holding it high above her head, blood dripping in her train, and she would have used it as a club or a donkey’s jawbone to crush Marcello’s face with a solid blow. Ah yes, she would have done it, and at the idea my heart pounded furiously, my throat became dry. Then she would have dug out the eyes of both men, she would have torn the flesh from the bones of their faces, she would have bitten them. Yes, yes, I felt that I wanted that, I wanted it to happen. An end of love and of that intolerable celebration, no embraces in a bed in Amalfi. Immediately shatter everything and every person in the neighborhood, tear them to pieces, Lila and I, go and live far away, lightheartedly descending together all the steps of humiliation, alone, in unknown cities. It seemed to me the just conclusion to that day. If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.”
― Elena Ferrante