Elena Sala

“I asked my mother what she believed about the soul and she thought for a moment. Then, looking not at me but at the hard, white light before us, she said that she believed that we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting. When she was growing up, she said that she had never thought of herself in isolation, but rather as inextricably linked to others. Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain.”
― Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow

“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

“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

“What you say is true,’ said Fr. Dioscuros with a smile. ‘You can pray anywhere. After all, God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.’ He gestured to the darkening sand dunes outside: ‘But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself . And unless you begin to know yourself, how can you even begin to search for God?”
― William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East