Eliane

“I always feel as if I'm struggling to become someone else. As if I'm trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I suppose it's part of growing up, yet it's also an attempt to re-invent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself - as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I'm still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as I'll come to defining myself.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Words got me into trouble. They are the deadliest weapons of all, so that now the gun seems almost innocent by comparison. I fired the shot to stop the words; they were so busy eating everything up. You have no idea how I hate words, how i see them winding out of people's mouths like sticky strands of a web, infinitely elastic, linking the speaker to the listener forever, and finally weaving an impermeable cocoon around the mind and then the poor, fast-beating heart itself.”
― Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, The Madness of a Seduced Woman

“أَعُدُّ اللَيالي لَيلَةً بَعدَ لَيلَةٍ وَقَد عِشتُ دَهراً لا أَعُدُّ اللَيالِيا
وَأَخرُجُ مِن بَينِ البُيوتِ لَعَلَّني أُحَدِّثُ عَنكِ النَفسَ بِاللَيلِ خالِيا
أَراني إِذا صَلَّيتُ يَمَّمتُ نَحوَها بِوَجهي وَإِن كانَ المُصَلّى وَرائِيا
وَما بِيَ إِشراكٌ وَلَكِنَّ حُبَّها وَعُظمَ الجَوى أَعيا الطَبيبَ المُداوِيا
أُحِبُّ مِنَ الأَسماءِ ما وافَقَ اِسمَها أَوَ اِشبَهَهُ أَو كانَ مِنهُ مُدانِيا”
― قيس بن الملوح, ديوان قيس بن الملوح: مجنون ليلى

“I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2: 1920-1923