SaniaF

“If there was a God up there, He must be laughing His head off at a human race capable of making atomic bombs and building artificial intelligence, but still uncomfortable with their own mortality and unable to sort out what to do with their dead. How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“Can it be that he has only seen her in seductive visions, and that this passion has been nothing but a dream? Surely they must have spent years hand in hand together—alone the two of them, casting off all the world and each uniting his or her life with the other’s? Surely when the hour of parting came she must have lain sobbing and grieving on his bosom, heedless of the tempest raging under the sullen sky, heedless of the wind which snatches and bears away the tears from her black eyelashes? Can all of that have been a dream—and that garden, dejected, forsaken, run wild, with its little moss-grown paths, solitary, gloomy, where they used to walk so happily together, where they hoped, grieved, loved, loved each other so long, “so long and so fondly?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Tell me why entire sleepless nights flash by in an inexhaustible blithe happiness, and when the dawn shines in through the windows, pink and radiant, and daybreak illumines the cheerless room with that uncertain fantastical light we know in Petersburg, does our dreamer, worn out and weary, throw himself on to his bed and fall asleep amid the blissful afterglow of his painfully shaken spirit and with such a languishingly sweet pain about his heart?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World