Sabahattin Ali

Send a hero into a dragon’s den, and his task is clear. It is a hero of another order who can summon up the courage to lower himself into a well of which we have no knowledge.

And here was the strangest thing: the more my situation worsened, the less I could be sure of surviving from one day to the next, the greater my shame and my reluctance to ask for help.

The more I needed my friends, the more I longed to run away.

He seemed so confident, so pleased with himself.

It was only my loneliness that ate at me, and it was this same loneliness that led me to betray myself in myriad ways.

my Madonna in a Fur Coat.

Maria,’ I said, ‘Maria. My Madonna in a Fur Coat.

I did not hear from Maria Puder again. I did not even hear her name … until yesterday … But I am jumping ahead … A month later, my last letter to her came back with a stamp saying ‘unclaimed, return to sender’. That was when I lost all hope. Even now it still shocks me, to remember how much I changed over the next few days. I could not move, or see, or feel, or think: what had given me strength to live had been swept away, leaving only my shadow.

I would wonder why I was still alive.

my days were just as empty and aimless as before, but also more painful. Because there was a difference: I’d believed, in my ignorance, that there was nothing more to life than this. I was suffering now because I knew that there was another way to live.