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Disappointed by the clunky translation

Starting ‘Women in Translation’ month in earnest ☝🏻

“The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not . . . yet, I occurred.”

“... to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.”

“You obviously are trained in all the lying tricks of statecraft, the double meanings and the power words. Language is nothing more than a weapon to you and, thus, you test my armor.” – Paul Muad’Dib

“Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.”

“Her first true motherly feelings were of incompetence and of being blithely ignored as inconsequential. She could not understand how the human race had ever managed to develop past a single generation. She continually wanted to strangle Liir, as a means of saving him from smooth-talking father figures.”

“Any casualty of the struggle is their fault, not ours. We don’t embrace violence but we don’t deny its existence—how can we deny it when its effects are all around us? That kind of denial is a sin…”

“You can’t divorce your particulars from politics”

“I’m beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”

“Wherever I went in those days, I stumbled across the bill collectors and misfortunes of my past, while any chance of a future worth living kept spinning farther and farther away.”

A long-awaited literary return to Appalachia… 🥹

“When your enemy’s also your judge, who can you turn to?”

“Sink into the mud, oh Palestine of mine, and suffer, my people, the bitterness of recognizing reality and being helpless before it.”

“Yes, when will those tender feelings die in me? I’ve had them all my life! This constant longing for the unknown, this feeling of melancholy that overwhelms me whenever I hear a song or smell a flower, and the sense of elation I feel at sunset. My love and yearning for the very earth of this green land of mine, so blessed and so filled with goodness.”

“Truth suffers from too much analysis. —ANCIENT FREMEN SAYING”

WE LOVE WHAT WE HAVE

We love what we have, no matter how
little,
because if we don’t, everything will be
gone. If we don’t,
we will no longer exist, since there will
be nothing here for us.
What’s here is something that we are
still
building. It’s something we cannot yet
see,
because we are part
of it.

“HARD EXERCISE

In Gaza,
breathing is a task,
smiling is performing
plastic surgery
on one's own face,
and rising in the morning,
trying to survive
another day, is coming back
from the dead.”

“But thank God for what remains.”

Reading about summary executions from 1956 as they're still happening in 2023... My heart will never recover from the horrors of the last sixty-one days.

“Did the Israelis give you warning?”
(Laughter)
He thinks I'm joking.

Rajah City, Gaza Strip, ~2003

“I let the mirror hold those flaws—because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time. Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself.”

“You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”

Feels good to return to a light YA fantasy, with everything that's happening in the world rn. 💔🇵🇸

“We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.”