“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.” 

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
— Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.”
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin 

“I meet a person, and in my mind I’m saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark.”
— Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel