There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

If poverty were a place, a hostile landscape into which you were deliberately pushed or accidentally stumbled, it would be an accursed forest—a damp and gloomy wildwood suspended in time. The branches clutch at you, the boles block your way, the brambles draw you in, determined not to let you out. Even when you manage to cut down one obstacle, instantly it is replaced by another.

“Things don’t disappear just because we wish them to. Even if we cover them with concrete and build over them and pretend they never existed, they’re still part of us, all those ghosts that we thought we’d buried deep inside, and, if we don’t face up to them, they’ll continue to haunt us.”