Clementine

“My imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world. But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it’s hard to summon it when you really need it.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“When thinking one cannot avoid beginning with certain convictions, but one must be aware that these convictions can be questioned and need to be defended with argument. One must also be aware that one's attempts to defend these convictions may fail, so that one may have to abandon or revise one's convictions. Thinking in an open-ended way does not mean starting from nowhere, but it does mean being able to arrive wherever thought and argument lead.”
― Alison Stone, An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy

“Those who mismanage our affairs would silence our criticism by pretending they have facts not avaliable to the rest of us. Our best weapon against them is not to marshal facts, of which they are truly managers, but passion. Passion is our hope and strenght."
”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah

“Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her
from what would come, even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to
enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most
valuable to you. He thought she deserved better than this, but he could see no
way out, for they had decided not to run, not to play roulette with yet another
departure. To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a
hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.
“What do you think happens when you die?” Nadia asked him.
“You mean the afterlife?”
“No, not after. When. In the moment. Do things just go black, like a phone
screen turning off? Or do you slip into something strange in the middle, like
when you’re falling asleep, and you’re both here and there?”
Saeed thought that it depended on how you died. But he saw Nadia seeing
him, so intent on his answer, and he said, “I think it would be like falling asleep.
You’d dream before you were gone.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West