Rafael Leitão

“The worst thing possible is to feel fully valued by others, and particularly – as I would put it – to be considered of standard value. It means we become literalized, and we come to a halt in the development that a lack of full appreciation prompts us to strive towards. When a person recognizes that he has become perfect and fulfilled, he should kill himself.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“Something strange has happened to the idea of privacy in our surreal time. Instead of being cherished, it appears to have become, a valueless quality—actually undesirable. If a thing is not made public, it doesn’t really exist. Your dog, your wedding, your beach, your baby, your dinner, the interesting meme you recently saw—these things need, on a daily basis, to be shared. Where attention has become the thing most hungered for, where the quest for followers and likes is the new gluttony, privacy has become unnecessary, unwanted, even absurd.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“We may be similarly disabled inhabitants of a world that consists of three dimensions, and we shall never know what a four-dimensional world is like. Do you see? We have no tools or senses to introduce us to a world with an extra dimension, let alone a fifth, and a seventh, and a twenty-sixth. Our minds cannot conceive of it.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“During those empty, sleepless nights, I thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. A knife was a tool, and acquired meaning from the use we made of it. Language, too, was a knife. I could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people's eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder