Letícia

“an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.
Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“You think this country returns our love? Nonsense! She vomits us up time and time again, sends us to hell, beats us down without mercy. With the Romans and the Greeks and the Arabs and the mosquitoes. So you think that someone here says, 'If she doesn't want me, I should go?' Someone here says 'There's no point in holding a country by force if she's been trying to get rid of you from the minute you came to her?' No. You hold on to her as hard as you can and you hope. You hope that maybe she'll finally look around and see you and say - that one. That's the one I want.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, One Night, Markovitch

“Por isso falava silenciosamente com o sol, na língua das estrelas, dizendo-lhe que viesse mais devagar, por favor, mais devagar. E, naquele mesmo momento, Iaakov Markovitch, deitado em sua cama, que pela primeira vez era também a cama de Bela Markovitch, implorava: mais devagar, por favor, mais devagar. E o sol, apesar de cientistas que insistiam que não era mais que fusão de hidrogênio e hélio, não podia negar as súplicas. Pois o sol – independentemente do que dissessem os cientistas – amava as pessoas em sua totalidade, na medida em que a distância permitia. Não fosse assim não circularia em torno delas dia e noite com preocupação, com dedicação maternal. E mesmo se cientistas dissessem que não era o sol que girava em torno das pessoas, e sim as pessoas em torno dele, e, mais grave ainda, que o giro nada tinha a ver com amor ou preocupação, e fosse motivado apenas por leis físicas, não haveria como contestar nem por um segundo aquilo que o olho enxergava e o coração sabia.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, One Night, Markovitch