Madeleine

“Once, sitting with them in a bar, she heard Curt talking to Brad, and Curt said "blowhard." She was struck by the word, by the irredeemable Americanness of it. Blowhard. It was a word that would never occur to her. To understand this was to realize that Curt and his friends would, on some level, never be fully knowable to her.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Marek hadn't felt anything vengeful in Jacob's objects, but he did sometimes imagine he felt a presence in the room when he visited. Of course, it was actually Lispeth and her memories of Jacob. She projected him back into the room so she could watch him sit and write or talk at the window, or turn over in bed. She was his ghost, in fact.”
― Otessa Mosfegh, Lapvona

“She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“She thought of a song her mother used to play, a woman singing plaintively about wishing for a river to skate away on … How true that feeling was. Her mother had felt it; now she did too. That was the real inheritance from her mother, she thought, more defining than any facial feature or mannerism. They both wanted to disappear.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein