Jordan

“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn't have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn't that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write?”
― Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty: A Friendship

“And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.