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Art Helps Us Live
I know very well that Gadda… is a great writer, but he is not my writer: for me in literature, more than in any other field, you love only what you find yourself in…
Books, some books, help you live, teach you how to live. They are the companions of solitude of all those lonely people who are uncomfortable in reality: proud and contemptuous, shy and gorgeous. They confirm you in your passions and hatreds, they reveal to you what until a moment before you only suspected…they contribute to the formation of character because they put you in front of examples you know you can never reach…
— Stenio Solin
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I don’t want to learn not to be afraid, I want to learn to tremble.
I don’t want to learn to be silent, I want to taste the silence from which every true word is born.
I don’t want to learn not to get angry, I want to feel the fire, surround it with transparency that illuminates what others are doing to me and what I can do.
I don’t want to accept, I want to welcome and reply.
I don’t want to be good, I want to be awake.
I don’t mean to hurt, I mean you’re hurting me, stop it.
I don’t want to be the best, I want to smile at my worst.
