Pauline Swen

“At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History