Jena Esque

“Arrietty used to make her 'e's' like little half-moons with a stroke in the middle-"
"Well?" said Kate
Mrs. May laughed and took up her work again. "My brother did too," she said.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it; even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself (“counteract feelings of ‘numbness’ ”). I was demonstrating, externally and irrefutably, an inward condition.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Mead.
O sweet elixir,
Ye bless the lips and steal the wits.
 ”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.”
― Marcel Proust