Iliana

“No one, alas, more oppressive than the oppressed.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“I felt that if a man's proposals met with approval, it should encourage him; if they met with opposition, it should make him fight back; but the real tragedy for him was to lift up his voice among the living and meet with no response neither approval nor opposition just as if he were left helpless in a boundless desert.”
― Lu Hsun, Selected Stories

“It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen’s case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.”
― D.H. Lawrence