Jacqueline Harpman

You’ve never seen a child, you don’t know what it means – their vulnerability, their trust, the love you feel for them, the anxiety, being ready to lay down your life to save them, and it’s unbearable to imagine a child’s pain.’

I cannot mourn for what I have not known.

how can you feel privileged not to have something that everyone else has?

Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence.

I cannot mourn for what I have not known.

But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity,

Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they’d known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?

if I’d led a normal life, like the women before, I would still have found myself at the dawn of my last day. Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they’d known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?

. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I

. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind