Elisa

“Yo tengo miedo. Tengo miedo de una cosa, de que en nuestra vida el miedo ocupe el lugar del amor.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things

“We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”
― Wisława Szymborska, Nothing Twice: Selected Poems / Nic dwa razy: Wybór wierszy