Suzan Sontag

- Is it old-fashioned to think that the purpose of literature is to educate us about life?

- Well, it does educate us about life. i wouldn’t be the person i am, i wouldn’t understand what i understand, were it not for certain books. i’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century russian literature: how should one live? a novel worth reading is an education of the heart. it enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. it’s a creator of inwardness.

Brave Woman

She is the bravest my eyes have ever seen
A lion bows, in shiver and fear
I am on my knees for I can not believe
A woman so beautiful, among us she breathes…

I offer this world and everything within to her feet…
I say proudly that I will protect her with fists…
She smiles, then gently she says to me…
I am a woman, strong and I do not need
Protection, for I may seem fragile
But I am stronger than steel…

I do not know what words to speak…
For I desire her love, and love her miserably…
But I have only my heart to offer
And she deserves better than me…

It does not matter that I love her endlessly…
She lives in a world that the devil dreams to flee…
And yet she stands strong with a smile shining through her lips…
With a laugh musical, poetry to my ears…
She is a brave woman…gentle and free

L'enfer c'est les autres

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. there are two ways to escape suffering it. the first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. the second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space"

Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)