Leticia

“Some women's arms are places of exile; others are a native land.”
― Amin Maalouf, Balthasar's Odyssey

“She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“What is an oyster if not the perfect food? It requires no preparation or cooking. Cooking would be an affront. It provides its own sauce. It’s a living thing until seconds before disappearing down your throat, so you know – or should know – that it’s fresh. It appears on your plate as God created it: raw, unadorned. A squeeze of lemon, or maybe a little mignonette sauce (red wine vinegar, cracked black pepper, some finely chopped shallot), about as much of an insult as you might care to tender against this magnificent creature. It is food at its most primeval and glorious, untouched by time or man. A living thing, eaten for sustenance and pleasure, the same way our knuckle-dragging forefathers ate them. And they have, for me anyway, the added mystical attraction of all that sense memory – the significance of being the first food to change my life. I blame my first oyster for everything I did after: my decision to become a chef, my thrill-seeking, all my hideous screwups in pursuit of pleasure. I blame it all on that oyster. In a nice way, of course.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

“If you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe