Mél ☽

“One hundred times have I been on the point of embracing her. Heavens! What a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it. And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts. So not children touch everything they see? And I!”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (English German Edition, illustrated): Die Leiden des jungen Werther

“There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect. Few know how to remain silent and respect the silence of others.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time,
place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She
was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone’s breath fills a balloon’s shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.”
― Nadine Gordimer, July's People

“Reading it feels like going out to the sea from the sands: at first, the waves are gentle and shy against my feet on the shoreline, lukewarm and sweet; but as I go farther and farther into the waters, the waves crash over me, cold and unrelenting, submerging me, leaving me gasping for breath, until finally, I am drowning in the story. It’s a bit like falling in love.”
― Aamna Qureshi, If I Loved You Less