Rob

“What would she be saying if she did? That she did want to marry him? For ten years, at least, since she was twelve or thirteen, Rosa had been declaring roundly to anyone who asked that she had no intention of getting married, ever, and that if she ever did, it would be when she was old and tired of life. When this declaration in its various forms had ceased to shock people sufficiently, she had taken to adding that the man she finally married would be no older than twenty-five. But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives. She didn't suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew that she certainly ought to not want to. But did she?”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“Only connect!”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we
should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than
we have knowledge of.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.”
― Edward Abbey