Jelena

“If you, young person, were to ask me what the soul is, I would answer like this: The soul is the weakest thing within us. Your soul is in your morbid symptoms.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Sympathy

There should be no despair for you
While nightly stars are burning;
While evening pours its silent dew,
And sunshine gilds the morning.
There should be no despair—though tears
May flow down like a river:
Are not the best beloved of years
Around your heart for ever?

They weep, you weep, it must be so;
Winds sigh as you are sighing,
And winter sheds its grief in snow
Where Autumn's leaves are lying:
Yet, these revive, and from their fate
Your fate cannot be parted:
Then, journey on, if not elate,
Still, NEVER broken-hearted!”
― Emily Brontë

“The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I am interested in human happiness, sir, in the better understanding of what it is and how it may be achieved. I wish to explore whether it is a state which arises from the chance convergence of circumstances, or whether it is a condition we may will ourselves to possess. I want to understand how we may recognise it when it is within our grasp and in what ways we can learn to live without it if we are not lucky enough to experience it.”
― Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister