Noah

“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.

She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“The official nomenclature of prejudice is a maze
that can make everything read like a bigoted bureaucrat’s file notings.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar - Gandhi Debate

“Kneeling on the moss-grown bank of the burn that flowed past the croft she leaned forward with cupped hand to drink, and felt, leaning forward, as if tender arms enfolded her and drew her gently to a bosom of rest; and in a moment she passed deeper and deeper into this embrace for ever and ever, like her grandmother, who died happily and left one mattress to her grand-daughter; deeper and deeper, and she saw her reflection washed away in the flow of the stream, and the earth floated off with her into space like the angel that glides away with us when we die, and once more the good autumnal scent of the earth filled her senses, and finally the earth laid its cheek to hers like a mother, while the waters of the world rippled on in her ears, telling of their love; then there was nothing more.”
― Halldór Laxness