Wei-Wei

“I realise I have become something I never thought possible: patriotic and proud about being an adopted Italian. In more honest moments, I realise that I might never quite be able to leave the country. That longing to leave, and the inability to pull yourself away from the bel casino, the 'fine mess', has been written about for centuries. Using the usual prostitution metaphor, one of the country's most important patriots, Massimo D'Azeglio, wrote: 'I can't live outside Italy, which is strange because I continually get angry with Italian ineptitude, envies, ignorance and laziness. I'm like one of the people who falls in love with a prostitute.' That, in fact, is precisely the feeling of living here: it is infuriating and endlessly irritating, but in the end it is almost impossible to pull yourself away. It's not just that everything is troppo bello, 'too beautiful', or that food and conversation are so good. It's that life seems less exciting outside Italy, the emotions seem muted. Stendhal wrote that the feeling one gets from living in Italy is 'akin to that of being in love', and it's easy to understand what he meant. There's the same kind of enchantment and serenity, occasionally insecurity and sadness. And writing about the country's sharp pangs of jealousy and paranoia, Stendhal knew that they exist precisely because the country's 'joys are far more intense and more lasting'. You can't have one without the other.”
― Tobias Jones, The Dark Heart of Italy: An Incisive Portrait of Europe's Most Beautiful, Most Disconcerting Country

“We staan elke dag op, doen wat van ons verwacht wordt, en gaan dan weer slapen, en dat noemen we leven. We saboteren onszelf zonder het te beseffen, omdat we nadoen wat ons ooit is voorgedaan, en dan denken we dat het zo móet gaan. En ondertussen organiseren we de dingen zo, dat we geen tijd hebben om stil te staan bij dat wat we ten diepste voelen. We vergeten wat we waard zijn en durven niet te geloven dat we het goeie wel degelijk verdienen. We vinden het makkelijker om te berusten bij ons leed, om onszelf te troosten na de pijn, dan te kiezen voor wat ons echt gelukkig zou maken.”
― Griet Op de Beeck, Kom hier dat ik u kus

“Wat waren ook alweer de verschillen tussen hen? Hij kon het zich niet herinneren. Het moest er zijn, dat afgrondelijke verschil, maar zijn handen grepen lucht. Nu de waanvoorstellingen waren opgetrokken, zag hij alleen nog maar hoe gelijk ze waren geweest in hun lijden en hun wanhoop.”
― Tommy Wieringa, Dit zijn de namen

“But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day