Viola Briatková

“Mariam always held her breath as she watched him go. She held her breath and, in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second that she didn't breathe God would grant her another day with Jalil.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“They are for ‘freedom’ when it is freedom to kill third-term fetuses or engage in same-sex marriages or stuff coke up their noses; they do not define freedom as anything to do with captive peoples around the world having the chance to escape the tyrannies that constrain them. They like Fidel because he is a thorn in America’s side and a sort of dime-store existentialist, and they rhapsodize about his spreading of literacy in Cuba without considering the fact that at the same time that he teaches people to read he tortures writers like Armando Valladares whose books he doesn’t like.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings

“Everybody says women are like water. I think it's because water is the source of life, and it adapts itself to its environment. Like women, water also gives of itself wherever it goes to nurture life....”
― Xinran, The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices

“When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.”
― Theodore Dalrymple