Veronika Decides to Die

"When I was still a young lawyer, I read some poems by an English poet, and something he said impressed me greatly: ‘Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains.' I always thought he was wrong. It was dangerous to overflow, because we might end up flooding areas occupied by our loved ones and drowning them with our love and enthusiasm. All my life I did my best to be a cistern, never going beyond the limits of my inner walls.
"Then, for some reason I will never understand, I began suffering from panic attacks. I became the kind of person I had fought so hard to avoid becoming: I became a fountain that overflowed and flooded everything around me. The result was my internment in Villete.

P. 181  from Paulo Coelho's book "Veronika  Decides to Die"
http://www.rulit.net/books/veronika-decides-to-die-read-68000-36.html

When will you allow life to overflow?


 "The Indians believe the murderer to be guilty, not society, not his parents, not his ancestors. Do the Japanese commit suicide because a son of theirs decides to take drugs and go out and shoot people? The reply is the same: no! And, as we all know, the Japanese will commit suicide at the drop of a hat. The other day I read that a young Japanese man killed himself because he had failed his university entrance exams."

82, 日本人會因為丟了一頂帽子而自殺。

 apart from certain grave pathological cases, people only go insane when they try to escape from routine. Do you understand?"
83. 除了一些特定的由精神病引起的嚴重案例之外，一般人只有在他們想要擺脫日常事務時才會發瘋

p.83   我瞭解，她回答。如果你覺得我沒有能力照顧她，你可以省省力氣，我從來沒有想著改變我的生活。
"I do," she replied. "And if you think that I won't be capable of looking after her, you can rest assured, I've never tried to change my life."


p.92

所以只是因為我給一條色布正確的名字，你就得到我不是瘋子的結論

 真確的名稱：（名字？）

"So just because I gave the right name to a bit of colored cloth you conclude that I'm not mad."

p.93 他卻借用了當年皇帝，國王，以及愛人們想要除掉眼中釘時喜歡用的名字為該物質命名。
－－》喜歡用的毒藥的名字為該物質命名。

Dr. Igor, the as-yet-unrecognized discoverer of this fatal substance, had given it the name of a poison much favored in the past by emperors, kings, and lovers of all kinds whenever they needed to rid themselves of some obstructive person.
－－－－－－－－－－－

p.93 但是這個毒藥，現在卻很不容易取得，而且非常昂貴
p.94 奇怪的是從來沒有人描述國蠜是一種毒藥，雖然大部份受它影響的人可以指出它的滋味，

It was odd that no one had ever described Vitriol as a mortal poison, although most of the people affected could identify its taste, and they referred to the process of poisoning as bitterness. To a greater or lesser degree, everyone had some bitterness in their organism, just as we are all carriers of the tuberculosis bacillus. But these two illnesses only attack when the patient is debilitated; in the case of bitterness, the right conditions for the disease occur when the person becomes afraid of so-called reality.