Bistra

“Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“And we leave home and go to live with this person forever; not because we are sure that he is the right person: in fact we are not entirely sure, and we always suspect that the right person for us is hiding away goodness knows where in the city. But we don’t want to know where he is hiding; we feel that we have by now very little to say to him, because we say everything to this person—who is not perhaps the right person—with whom we now live; and we want to receive the good and the evil of our lives from this person and with him. Every now and then violent differences between us and this person erupt into the open; and yet they are unable to destroy the infinite peace we have within us. After many years, only after many years, after a thick web of habits, memories and violent differences has been woven between us, we at last realize that he is, in truth, the right person for us, that we could not have put up with anyone else, that it is only from him that we can ask everything that the heart needs. Now,”
― Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues: Essays

“Noi siamo cinque fratelli. Abitiamo in città diverse, alcuni di noi stanno all'estero: e non ci scriviamo spesso. Quando c'incontriamo, possiamo essere, l'uno con l'altro, indifferenti o distratti. Ma basta, fra noi, una parola. Basta una parola, una frase: una di quelle frasi antiche, sentite e ripetute infinite volte, nel tempo della nostra infanzia. [...] Quelle frasi sono il nostro latino, il vocabolario dei nostri giorni andati, sono come i geroglifici egiziani o degli assiro-babilonesi, la testimonianza d'un nucleo vitale che ha cessato di esistere, ma che sopravvive nei suoi testi, salvati dalla furia delle acque, dalla corrosione del tempo. Quelle frasi sono il fondamento della nostra unità familiare, che sussisterà finché saremo al mondo, ricreandosi e risuscitando nei punti più diversi della terra.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare