Antwone

“Heading up into the mountains, I wondered if there might come a time when I would lose the memory of that day – the clarity and the stillness of it – and how I would feel about that. How I would feel if one day I stopped carrying certain things in my head, so many of the things I kept returning to in my head…and whether this meant I had managed to go far enough away, into a time when all of this was old. Which would also mean a time when I was old, older.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“I do not wish to explain my passion – that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify – but simply to describe it.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“Isn't it our duty to accept that faithless friend as we do the faithful one who sacrifices himself? Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship? That the more we give, the less we expect?”
― Sándor Márai, Embers

“I am not angry at you, said his friend with emphatic seriousness. I only wanted you to see it all once, and understand. When the Bavarian came at me with his drawn sword and started lunging and feinting in all directions like a lunatic, as if he were entertaining himself and as if our attempts to slash and cripple each other out of pure vanity were nothing but a huge joke, I suddenly saw my mother's face, saw her walking to the market every day for fear that the cook might overcharge her by two fillers, because at the end of a year the two fillers all add up to five florins, which she can send me in an envelope...and I literally wanted to kill the Bavarian who wanted to injure me out of sheer bravado, and had no idea that anything he might do to me would be a mortal offense against two people in Galicia who have sacrificed their lives for me without a word.”
― Sándor Márai, Embers