Mél ☽

“She did have one book—a thick paperback snatched up in passing, until that moment something bought years ago and never read, perhaps it was meant for this kind of situation: Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, in translation as The Betrothed. She did not want to begin it because what would happen when she had read it? There was no other. Then she overcame the taboo (if she did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here when it was finished).”
― Nadine Gordimer

“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

“I am not a pessimist. I suffer and I complain, but I don't know if suffering is the general rule or if it is human to suffer... I am not a pessimist, I am merely sad.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“I'd rather have my job than yours."
"Why?"
"Because your job deals very largely with what we call right and
wrong — and I'm not at all sure that there's any such thing.
Suppose it's all a question of glandular secretion. Too much of
one gland, too little of another — and you get your murderer,
your thief, your habitual criminal. Clement, I believe the time will
come when we'll be horrified to think of the long centuries in
which we've indulged in what you may call moral reprobation, to
think how we've punished people for disease — which they can't
help, poor devils. You don't hang a man for having tuberculosis.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage