Van Cabido

“Madlen: 'It's a relief to me, Lady Queen, that in your own pain, you take no interest in hurting yourself.'

Bitterblue: 'Why would I? Why should I? It's foolish. I would like to kick the people who do it.'

Madlen: 'That would, perhaps, be redundant, Lady Queen.”
― Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue

“She looks very virtuous and very melancholy."

"Virtue is like the precious odors, most fragrant when it is crushed.”
― Baroness Emma Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

“…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups were generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy – space exploration, the UN, vaccines and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the ‘not-a-shit’ side as one can.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises