Mary

“We talk about love like it's an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them. To know what it was like to have one place where we belonged. Where we fit.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“Dear Milena,
I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.”
― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black