Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin

"Defeat is only a phase for me. I must conquer, live. Forgive me for the suffering I inflict on you. At least it will never be useless suffering."

Henry and June, by Anaïs Nin

"Pain is something to master, not to wallow in."

Henry and June, by Anaïs Nin

To attack gentleness is an unnamed crime that our era often commits in the name of its divinities: efficiency, speed, profitability. We try to make it desirable, exchangeable, institutionalizable, so that it does not upset everything. We kill gentleness with gentleness. We make it into a contaminated drug, the need for which is inculcated in us.

Dufourmantelle, Anne. Power of Gentleness - Meditations on the Risk of Living.

Gentleness is political. It does not bend; it grants no prolonging, no excuse. It is a verb: we perform acts of gentleness. It aligns with the present and concerns all the possibilities of the human. From animality it takes instinct; from childhood, enigma; from prayer, calming; from nature, unpredictability; from light, light.

Dufourmantelle, Anne. Power of Gentleness - Meditations on the Risk of Living.

Theories of self-improvement and pursuit of happiness participate in spite of themselves in this grand marketplace of “well-being” that refuses to enter into negativity and confusion and fear as essential human elements, paralyzing the future as well as the present.

Dufourmantelle, Anne. Power of Gentleness - Meditations on the Risk of Living.

There is no limit to gentleness, rather a continual invitation to become infected by it—and that invitation can be broken in an instant.

Dufourmantelle, Anne. Power of Gentleness - Meditations on the Risk of Living.

Is gentleness sufficient to heal? It equips itself with no power, no knowledge. Embracing the other’s vulnerability means that the subjects cannot avoid recognizing his own fragility. This acceptance is a force; it makes gentleness a higher degree of compassion than simple care. To empathize, to “suffer with” is to experience with the other what he feels, without giving in to it. It means being able to open yourself up to others, their grief or suffering, and to contain that pain by carrying it elsewhere.

Dufourmantelle, Anne. Power of Gentleness - Meditations on the Risk of Living.

For if caress, erotic games, children’s bodies, fur, cats’ bellies … are soft and gentle, the renunciation of the dying person who lets go is also gentle.

Dufourmantelle, Anne. Power of Gentleness - Meditations on the Risk of Living. Foreword: Philosophy in Furs.

We perform acts of gentleness. We demonstrate gentleness. We soften the end of a life, its beginning. Gentleness is an enigma in its simplicity. It comes to recognize its own obviousness. As giver and receiver, it belongs just as much to touch as to thought.

Dufourmantelle, Anne. Power of Gentleness - Meditations on the Risk of Living

"Childbirth is (or may be) one aspect of the entire process of a woman’s life, beginning with her own expulsion from her mother’s body, her own sensual suckling or being held by a woman, through her earliest sensations of clitoral eroticism and of the vulva as a source of pleasure, her growing sense of her own body and its strengths, her masturbation, her menses, her physical relationship to nature and to other human beings, her first and subsequent orgasmic experiences with another’s body, her conception, pregnancy, to the moment of first holding her child."

Of Woman Born, by Adrienne Rich

"An ample reservoir of stoicism is needed to get through the newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry."

Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag

"As such, just as our emotional connections can elevate us, they can also bring us down or debilitate us. Whilst most of us discover our greatest joy and happiness in our relationships with others, our human emotional connections also mean that we can be disabled by grief and find it almost impossible to live without loved ones. We all too often find ourselves uniquely connected to another’s suffering, crushed both emotionally and physically by cruelty or the wrong type of social connection, or debilitated by isolation or loneliness (Bzdok and Dunbar 2020; Gilbert 2021; Spreng et al. 2020). This emotional sensitivity seems hard to explain within a functional evolutionary framework, and is rarely acknowledged in broader society. Yet, far from a fault, it is also an essential part of human experience."

Hidden Depths, by Penny Spikins

"There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives the way we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on."

Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

"I have not, in fact, become more loving, more generous , more capacious. I have merely become more afraid of love's limits, and more certain that they exist."

A Life's Work, by Rachel Cusk

Água Viva, by Clarice Lispector