Paula M.

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. the Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W H Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howard''s End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.”
― Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

“Falar do trigo e não dizer
o joio.
Percorrer
em voo raso os campos
sem pousar
os pés no chão.
Abrir
um fruto e sentir
no ar o cheiro
a alfazema.
Pequenas coisas,
dirás, que nada
significam perante
esta outra, maior: dizer
o indizível.
Ou esta:
entrar sem bússola
na floresta e não perder
o rumo.
Ou essa outra, maior
que todas e cujo
nome por precaução
omites.
Que é preciso,
às vezes,
não acordar o silêncio.”
― Albano Martins

“For most of history, anonymous was a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf