Lena

“As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“And I could never understand why you were insensitive to the sorrow and shame you inflicted on me with your words and judgements – it was as if you didn’t sense your own power.  And I certainly made you ill with words; but I knew what I was doing, though it hurt me, but I couldn’t control myself, I couldn’t hold back my words – though I regretted them.  But you landed blows with your words and you were clueless – you never pitied anybody, not then, not later – and people were defenceless before you. And”
― Franz Kafka, Letter to My Father

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles