Efsun Ecem

“The next morning, the thirty-three-year-old bachelor with an irascible character, who had so passionately deflowered the twenty-two-year-old neighbor girl Berta Faust, promised himself he would make sure that —as soon as this nightmarish war was over— the broodingly shy Berta with the vast astonishment in her eyes would get a man with Alban Bergian faithfulness and Beethovenesque rigor.”
― Marianne Fritz, The Weight of Things

“You were supposed to say, I
am wholly yours, nothing
but these words.”
― W.G. Sebald, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001

“The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, reawakening his senses with her fresh life, even to the old winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early spring sunshine, and warming him into joy because she had joy.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Consider this: Could it be true that, in all Russian literature, there isn’t a single clear and joyous depiction of the sun?”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories