Ourania Topa

“Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.
I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I though, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Στο βάθος, πίσω κι'απ'αυτήν την απόφαση να φανεί τίμιος, δεν είτανε παρά ο εγωισμός του που αγωνιούσε. Η ανάγκη της ανάτασης, ο πόθος του ηρωισμού που θα μας εξυψώσει στα μάτια του εαυτού μας, μήπως δεν είναι το συνηθέστερο ελατήριο κάθε μας πράξης ενάρετης; Έτσι πίσω κι απ'την πιο αγνή θυσία, κρύβεται η στενή ιδιοτέλεια της φιλαρέσκειας, ενός μεταρσιωμένου, πες, ναρκισσισμού. Κι' ο δισταγμός ανάμεσα σε μια χειρονομία ωραία ή μια κακοήθεια, κρύβει την ίδια και κοινή αγωνία: Τη δίψα της περηφάνειας. Της αγγελικής ή της σατανικής.”
― Άγγελος Τερζάκης, Η μενεξεδένια πολιτεία

“But the past is the biggest country of all, and there's a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live.”
― Susan Sontag, In America