Valentina

“And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“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

“Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the one thing that struck me most about life is the capacity for change. One day you're a person and the next day they tell you you're a dog. At first it's hard to bear, but after a while you learn not to look at it as a loss. There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Sirotinji su svi ratovi isti, jer je sirotinja budalasta pa gine i vjeruje kako je žrtva beskrajnome Bogu mila. A on ustvari okrene glavu na drugu stranu da ne gleda kako mu stvorenja odlaze u štetu. Stvorio je i jedne i druge, krst i polumjesec je stvorio, ljude s obje strane koji jednako vjeruju u jedinoga Boga, stvoritelja Neba i Zemlje, pa kad im sablja odcapari glavu, posljednja misao glavi je da pada u blato na svetome putu i u svetome ratu. I da će duša otići u raj u kojem su valjda, iako se o tome ništa ne govori, razdvojene odaje onih koji padoše pod krstom i nas koje mlad mjesec čuva. Ako nisu razdvojene, pa ako je i džennet udešen da se duše miješaju jedne s drugima, tada smo zalud krvavili sablje.”
― Miljenko Jergović, Inšallah, Madona, Inšallah