anna

“For what use is it to forbid what we can't prevent? If books are forbidden, children read them on the sly.”
― André Gide, The Counterfeiters

“We're waiting for a glance or a word, some acknowledgement that we are here.”
― Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

“I wondered at him, so wise and so foolish, to have lived with me all these months and not know that the worst storms break inside a man.”
― Maria McCann, As Meat Loves Salt

“The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country