#*relasi

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Letter from Gaza by Ghassan Kanafani, from Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Story (translated by Hilary Kilpatrick)

I loved Nadia from habit, the same habit that made me love all that generation which had brought up on defeat and displacement that it had come to think that a happy life was a kind of social deviation.

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The Falcon by Ghassan Kanafani, from Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Story (translated by Hilary Kilpatrick)

Our world was arranged with extreme care: each one according to his rank. And that is exactly what made our relationship with the guards of the building that we, the engineers of the New Construction Company, occupied a relationship of greeting and no more. "Good evening, Jadaan." The answer would come curtly from the wooden bench: "Good evening, Abdallah." This Abdallah was each of us; each one of us he called Abdallah. Jadaan did not bother to learn our names, each of us was Abdallah to him, and may God release the believers from the bother of remembering foreigners' name.

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The Book of Queens by Joumana Haddad

Beds. Two-by-two meters of heaven and hell, where so many promises are made and broken. A tumultuous ocean of ups and downs, yeses and nos. Fouad was our bed's iceberg and I was its Titanic. Which one of us sank the other? ... Don't say sex. Sex is just a cover up. A cover up for that desperate search of oneness, that longing to forget our intrinsic loneliness. If Fouad was a thoughtful lover, would I have still cheated on him?

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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

With Lan, one of my tasks was to take a pair of tweezers and pluck, one by one, the grey hairs from her head. "The snow in my hair," she explained, "it makes my head itch. Will you pluck my itchy hairs, Little Dog. The snow is rooting into me." She slid a pair of tweezers between my fingers, "Make Grandma young today, okay?" she said real quiet, grinning. For this work I was paid in stories. After positioning her head under the window's light, I would kneel on a pillow behind her, the tweezers ready in my grip. She would start to talk, her tone dropping an octave, drifting deep into a narrative ... A familiar story would follow, punctuated with the same dramatic pauses and inflections during the moment of suspense or crucial turns. I'd mouth along with sentences, as if watching a film for the umpteenth time—a movie made by Lan's words and animated by my imagination. In this way, we collaborated.

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Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others by Connie Burk and Laura van Dernoot Lipsky

The work was intense, difficult, and often very sad, but the feeling we had working together was amazing. There were people who were radiant, who sang while they worked, who took time to catch up daily on each other’s families, who lovingly greeted everyone with whom they came in contact, who remained inspired in spite of the despair around them.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"What’s the matter?” he asked “Nothing.” “What do you want me to do for you?” “I want you to be old. Ten years older. Twenty years older!” What she meant was: I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Tereza’s mother never stopped reminding her that being mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

... after making love he had an uncontrollable craving to be by himself; waking in the middle of the night at the side of an alien body was distasteful to him, rising in the morning with an intruder repellent; he had no desire to be overheard brushing his teeth in the bathroom, nor was he enticed by the thought of intimate breakfast.