Janine

“Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: “Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.” Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity— which I wonder whether I belong to —really had a very vivid imagination.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“All of my joys have been pulled out of my mouth like teeth. All my home is nothing but sadness and silence and ruin and memory. I have been reduced, I am my own ghost, all my own beauty and youth have shrilled away, there are no illusions of happiness to impel me. Life is a prison of poverty and aborted dreams, it is nothing but a slow progress to my place beneath the soil.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others -- why they must dream up new and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere, beyond this dominion...All I ever wanted was to know *this* world.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“There are no words from this world for the entrance into the Darkness, no words for the last bite.”
― Mariana Enríquez, Our Share of Night