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“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver

“Once again her face changed. She was like someone standing in strong sunlight on a mountain top, looking back down the valley from which she had emerged and trembling with the memory still in her bones of the length and nature of the road she had travelled, the glaciers and forded rivers, the weariness and danger, and conscious of how far she still had to go.”
― Magda Szabó, The Door

“We were both wrong: she who put her faith in me, and I who thought too well of myself.”
― Magda Szabó, The Door

“If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley