Olga K

“When we were alive, they told us that when we died we'd go to heaven. And they said that heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That's what they said. And that's what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew. Because the land of the dead isn't a place of reward or a place of punishment, it is a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace. But now this child has come offering us a way out and I'm going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glistening in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“La dimora di mio padre era buia e silenziosa. Il suo palazzo era vicino a quello di Oceano, sepolto nella roccia della terra, con mura di levigata ossidiana. Certo, perché no? Avrebbero potuto essere di qualsiasi materiale al mondo, marmo rosso sangue d'Egitto o legno di balsamo d'Arabia, mio padre non aveva che da desiderarlo. Ma a lui piaceva come l'ossidiana rifletteva la sua luce, come le superfici lisce catturassero il fuoco al suo passaggio. Non teneva conto, naturalmente, di quanto fosse nera in sua assenza. A mio padre non è mai riuscito di immaginare il mondo privo della sua presenza”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles