Ian Lewis

“As soon as you can't go back to where you came from, you begin the life in railway lobbies; everything is temporary and you have no reason to plan anything or start anything anew because you're waiting for your train, and nothing can be important besides waiting and chatting with others who are waiting. That train will never come, as everyone who has ever waited for it knows, but you don't think about that until you spend your last ducat, diamond, or dollar.”
― Miljenko Jergović, Dvori od oraha

“The beauty of Paris or London is only an alibi for the criminals who have allowed Warsaw, Dresden, Vukovar and Sarajevo to disappear. But even if they hadn't ceased to exist, they would have become places inhabited by people who even in peacetime were ready to evacuate, who were prepared to abandon their books.”
― Miljenko Jergović, Sarajevo Marlboro

“How could a man who'd had a good mother become habitually cruel towards the weak, unfaithful to the woman who has given him her love and a tyrant with his own children? But a good mother must not be, as I had been, a one-dimensional, self-sacrificing creature: she must be a woman, a human being.”
― Sibilla Aleramo, Una donna

“To love, to sacrifice oneself, and to submit! Was this all what she had been destined for, and perhaps what all women were destined for?”
― Sibilla Aleramo, Una donna