Renee Hanley

“But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon,' said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour, 'character is not cut in marble — it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.'
'Then it may be rescued and healed,' said Dorothea.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Don't you think he may be pursuing an ideal that is hidden in a cloud of unknowing — like an astronomer looking for a star that only a mathematical calculation tells him exists?”
― William Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

“She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet