Justine

“When one has just seen the woman one loves, the sight of every other woman damages the vision and physically hurts the eyes;”
― Stendhal, Love

“And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“The more one pleases generally, the less one pleases profoundly.”
― Stendhal, Love

“what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo