Nadine Al Haj

“Of one thing, though, she was sure: "I want to travel," she confessed.
Books were making her restless. She was beginning to read, faster, more, until she was inside the narrative and the narrative inside her, the pages going by so fast, her heart in her chest - she couldn't stop... And pictures of the chocolaty Amazon, of stark Patagonia in the National Geographics, a transparent butterfly snail in the sea, even of an old Japanese house slumbering in the snow... - She found they affected her so much she could often hardly read the accompanying words - the feeling they created was so exquisite, the desire so painful.”
― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“You still think I’m too optimistic, don’t you?” Shallan said.
“It’s not your fault,” Kaladin said. “I’d rather be like you. I’d rather not have lived the life I have. I would that the world was only full of people like you, Shallan Davar.”
“People who don’t understand pain.”
“Oh, all people understand pain,” Kaladin said. “That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s . . .”
“The sorrow,” Shallan said softly, “of watching a life crumble? Of struggling to grab it and hold on, but feeling hope become stringy sinew and blood beneath your fingers as everything collapses?”
“Yes.”
“The sensation—it’s not sorrow, but something deeper—of being broken. Of being crushed so often, and so hatefully, that emotion becomes something you can only wish for. If only you could cry, because then you’d feel something. Instead, you feel nothing. Just . . . haze and smoke inside. Like you’re already dead.”
He stopped in the chasm.
She turned and looked to him. “The crushing guilt,” she said, “of being powerless. Of wishing they’d hurt you instead of those around you. Of screaming and scrambling and hating as those you love are ruined, popped like a boil. And you have to watch their joy seeping away while you can’t do anything. They break the ones you love, and not you. And you plead. Can’t you just beat me instead?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
Shallan nodded, holding his eyes. “Yes. It would be nice if nobody in the world knew of those things, Kaladin Stormblessed. I agree. With everything I have.”
He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken.
Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway.
It was the single most beautiful thing he’d seen in his entire life.
“How?” he asked.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police