Valentina

“But with superior morale, with an unwavering, fanatical spirit, everything is possible!”
― Timur Vermes, Er ist wieder da

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Najbolje je zaboraviti, da umre ljudsko sjećanje na sve što je ružno, i da djeca ne pjevaju pjesme o osveti.”
― Meša Selimović, The Fortress

“For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation, from whatever perdition, lies in love; in fact, it is her only way to it.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead