Holly

“But I won’t leap. I sat on my bed and said to God: You’ve taken her, but You haven’t got me yet. I know Your cunning. It’s You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You’re a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don’t want Your peace and I don’t want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I know that history is supposed to be written by the winners, but it seems to me that is not a good approach. Take the Bible. It’s the first history, but it’s actually told by the losers, since in the end the Israelites are expelled from their own land and they have to go to Babylon, as in, by the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept (psalm whatever), and I think it’s because they’re so weepy that the writing is so good. Take the story of David. The way poor King Saul gets written about, it’s like he’s an idiot and a maniac, because you think, well, it was written by David’s guys. But by the end, David looks more like the idiot and maniac, even though he’s supposed to be the hero. Point: there comes a time in everyone’s life when only the truth will do, and you have to look reality square in the eyes. This is one of those times. Also, when you look into the past, you see the future. This is physics.”
― Michael Lavigne, The Wanting

“I’m a man of hate. But I didn’t feel much hatred; I had called other people hysterical, but my own words were overcharged. I could detect their insincerity. What I chiefly felt was less hate than fear. For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you—with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell—can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. It’s something He can demand of any of us, leap.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“No one can make you feel inferior without your permission”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt