Ivana

“It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you,--you'd forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“Having faith is believing in something you just know ain't true.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“She had a passion for all people who did anything to perfection.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita