Gunel

“If Romania's superstars were suffering, would the world finally understand the terrible plight of the ordinary Romanian people? No. Of course not. How could we expect others to feel our pain or hear our cries for help when all we could do was whisper?”
― Ruta Sepetys, I Must Betray You

“...for wasn’t there sufficient pleasure to be had in silent patience? in viewing others vices in compassion and enjoying their vulgareties.”
― Ali Sabahattin, Madonna in a Fur Coat

“We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to complement each other, but sometimes after one of us had had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colours went together. We knew that girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us that we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with wild sense of self-importance. Like, 'gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.' But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff... Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!