Elena Sala

“Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves.”
― Charlotte Wood, The Natural Way of Things

“Do not piss as you stand and face the sun, but do it after the sun sets and before it rises, and even then do not be naked, for nights belong to the gods.
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Sire your children when you return from a feast of the gods, not when you return from an ill-omened burial.
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The sixth day of the month does not favor plants but is good for the birth of boys; it does not favor either the birth or the marriage of girls. But gelding of kids and lambs hurts less then.”
― Hesiod, Theogony / Works and Days

“My dreams fill me and help me eat time.”
― Wilma Stockenström, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

“Solomon's suitors for myrrh and frankincense; Zeu's children in a royal hunt for the seat of the sun-god of the Nile; scouts and emissaries from Genghis Khan; Arab geographers and also hunters for slaves and ivory; soul and gold merchants from Gaul and from Bismark's Germany; land-pirates and human game-hunters from Victorian and Edwardian England: they had all passed here bound for a kingdom of plenty, driven sometimes by holy zeal, sometimes by genuine thirst for knowledge and the quest for the spot where the first man's umbilical cord was buried, but more often by mercenary commercial greed and love of the wanton destruction of those with a slightly different complexion from theirs.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood