A terrible sadness threatened to overwhelm me as I wondered how two people capable of such love for each other had eventually felt so little for the child they had produced between them.

Toni Maguire
About This Quote

In his book, The Glass Bees , Ismail Kadare writes about a child, a girl named Doctora, who, by her own design, lives in the dark of the basement where she is hidden away with her father. She is the only one who knows the truth of her existence and she is kept very carefully hidden where she can never be seen by anyone outside of her family. Her life is lived behind the stone wall of the basement and she gradually begins to wonder if this is all there is to her. She has no idea what is outside of this place and wonders if there are other people on the other side who might want to see her.

Eventually she becomes so desperate to know more about what is happening in the rest of the world that she sets out to test the wall of the basement that she has spent all of her life in. She reaches out to touch it with her hand and finds that it is not made of stone but made out of glass. She runs off into the night with this new found knowledge and explores everything that she can find out about this strange new world that exists beyond what she has ever known. Kadare captures what it means to be trapped like Doctora in his writing here because he has created something completely new for his reader to experience.

He forces them outside of their comfort zone and asks them to get up each morning and try something new, even if they feel like they can’t do it. He wants us to try all day, every day because things are constantly changing in our world and we have to keep pushing forward in order to find out more about what is going on around us.

Source: Dont Tell Mummy: A True Story Of The Ultimate Betrayal

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  1. A terrible sadness threatened to overwhelm me as I wondered how two people capable of such love for each other had eventually felt so little for the child they had produced between them.
  2. We were young, she continued, while she had a bad heart. Did we not want to earn our tips, she asked us and, cowed, we refrained from introducing the subject again. Her bad heart, I noticed, did not force her to abstain from smoking, or...
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