Mél ☽

“Constance sighed, and tapped her fingers irritably and almost noiselessly on the stair rail. "I wish she'd hurry,"
she said into my ear, "my soup is going to boil over.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“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

“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