“Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they’ll leave you, sure. There’s no return to what was and no way back. There’s just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting.”
— Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

“We don’t know what we’d do. Nobody knows what accident of fate or DNA character will determine how we act when the shit hits the fan.”

— Francine Prose, Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas

“Isn’t that how it is when you must decide with your heart? You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow. You can tell yourself, That’s not my problem, but those words do not wash the trouble away. Maybe it is no longer a problem in your life. But it is always a problem in your heart.”
— Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife

Unless she would come to him, he must remain as nothingness. It was a hard experience. But after her repeated obliviousness to him, after he had seen so often that he did not exist for her, after he had raged and tried to escape, and said he was good enough by himself, that he was a man, and could stand alone, he must, in the starry multiplicity of the night, humble himself, and admit and know that without her he was nothing. - The Rainbow (D.H Lawrence)

The moment I saw you I knew it would be the closest I would get to being close. I didn’t know what to do with that feeling, Happiness. 

— Effy Stonem

You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it. 

— V FOR VENDETTA

Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. They were not perfect, but they were my friends. 

— Girl Interrupted

She could neither wake nor sleep. As if crushed between the past and the future, like a flower that comes above ground only to find a great stone lying above it, she was helpless. - D.H Lawrence