free, free at last

“I want to live with myself, / I want to enjoy the good that I owe to heaven, / alone, without witnesses, / free of love, of jealousy, / of hate, of hope, of fear.”
— Fray Luis de León, The Life Removed (verse 40), translated by Eliot Weinberger



“You have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you. Too far, and they abandon you.”
— Hanif Kureishi