Liudmyla Baran

“У тому, що ти чужий, є якась радість, привабливість. Це - наче ласощі. Добре воно: не розуміти мови, не знати звичаїв, блукати, як дух, серед інших - далеких, незбагненних. Тоді прокидається особлива мудрість: уміння здогадуватися, ловити неочевидне. Прокидаються кмітливість і уважність. Чужий віднаходить особливий кут зору і хоч-не-хоч стає своєрідним мудрецем. Хто переконав нас, що бути своїм - так добре і зручно? Лише чужий по-справжньому розуміє, яким є світ.”
― Ольга Токарчук, Księgi Jakubowe

“I tell them the truth. I tell them I am thirty-one years old and seventy-three thousand dollars in debt. I tell them that since college I’ve moved eleven times, had seventeen jobs and several relationships that didn’t work out. I’ve been estranged from my father since twelfth grade, and earlier this year my mother died. My only sibling lives three thousand miles away. What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself. Maybe some of you, I tell them, have found this place already. Maybe some of you will find it years from now. My hope is that some of you will find it for the first time today by writing.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. I’d have them keep a journal and have them freewrite after they read each assignment. What did this make you think about? That’s what I’d want to know. I think you could get some really original ideas that way, not the old regurgitated ones like man versus nature. Just shoot me if I ever assign anyone an essay about man versus nature. Questions like that are designed to pull you completely out of the story. Why would you want to pull kids out of the story? You want to push them further in, so they can feel everything the author tried so hard to create for them.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“He opened his damp eyes again to stare at the cross on the altar. He might not believe, but the cross meant something to him, nonetheless. It stood for Ted and Joan, for order and stability, but also for the unknowable and unresolvable, for the human craving for meaning in chaos, and for the hope of something beyond the world of pain and endless striving. Some mysteries were eternal and unresolvable by man, and there was relief in accepting that, in admitting it. Death, love, the endless complexity of human beings: only a fool would claim to fully understand any of them.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave