Ashley

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Lust and learning,' Katherine once said. 'That's really all there is, isn't it?' And it seemed to Stoner that that was exactly true, that that was one of the things he had learned.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Funny," he said. "You're like a little death." "What?" I asked. "You are. You're...gloomy yet charming. I like it." "Well, no on has said that before." "You're gently death-ish. You know about death, you're aware of it, and most people aren't anymore. But you're not a killer. You're a soft darkness." A soft darkness.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner