Grace M

“At least," she continued, "it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself" -- she drew together her troubled brows -- "but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“A.- I'm not sure about good and evil at all anymore.
Q. - Is that a bad sign in itself?
A.- Not necessarily.
Q.- What would be the test of corruption?
A. - Becoming really insincere -- calling myself "not such a bad fellow," thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state that they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood -- she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
It's not about the outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.
A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch