Selman

“I wouldn't care about hurting myself or anybody else. Because I know now that doing things doesn't hurt you; you get hurt by avoiding them”
― Irvine Welsh, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

“There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the 'inconsolable longing' in the human heart for 'we know not what'. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something - or, in our case, for someone.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“I might know, too, what Baldwin meant when he said only love could assuage America's race problem, but I can only grasp it when I think of romantic love. I did, after all, fall in love with Turkey. I fell in love with Istanbul, with Rana, with Caner, with all the Turks and Istanbullus who welcomed me; I fell in love with foreign men, with the cats of Cihangir, with the Anatolian roads, with even the smell of burning coal in winter. When you are in love, you feel a superhuman amount of empathy because, crucially, it is in your self-interest to do so. It wasn't until I loved like this that I could understand why only love could solve America's race problem, and by extension its imperial one: that it is not until one contemplates loving someone, caring about that person's physical and emotional well-being, wanting that person to thrive, wanting to protect that person, and most of all wanting to understand that person, that we can imagine what it would feel like if that person was hurt, if that person were hurt by others or, most important, if that person was hurt by you. Only if that person's suffering becomes your suffering —which is in a sense what love is— and only when white Americans begin to look upon another people's destruction as they would their own, will they finally feel the levels of rational and irrational rage terrifying enough to vanquish a century of their own indifference.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“Anti-Americanism is not some bitter mental disorder inflamed by conspiracy theories and misplaced furies and envy. It is a broken heart, a defensive crouch, a hundred-year-old relationship, bewilderment that an enormous force controls your life but does not know or love you.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World