Sublime

taciturn

La splendida frase di Esiodo fa colpo su Erica, che la ripete con una certa deferenza: «Half is better than all...», poi però è lei a fare colpo su di me quando, per tutta risposta, mi dice che perdere è yin e vincere yang, ma che perdere è il miglior modo di vincere – «A te e a me fa comodo pensarla così, non credi?».

Something must have snapped inside her, and men seem to sense it, for she isn’t really being pursued by any of them, even though her delicate blond profile has an aristocratic look among the coarse faces, round and red like apples, of the village girls. But these postwar seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds aren’t waiting quietly and patiently, waitin

implacable,

Over the years, Da’s anger became Mary’s own. She locked her memories of her mother deep inside her heart. It was easier, she learned, to be angry than to be sad.

abnegation,