Emily

“Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language.  English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.  It has all grown one way.  The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.  There is nothing ready made for him.  He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.  Probably it will be something laughable.”
― Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill

“She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Does it hurt?" we finally heard her whisper, and in that moment, she was achingly beautiful, beautiful almost beyond belief: She was warmth, she was moisture, she was light, she was the adamant perfection of a million billion snowflakes in a split second's descent, she was tender, she was eternal, and she was memory, and she was love.”
― Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

“there are words that cover up the world.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh