brooke b

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? He could feel it, he realized. He wished he’d said that.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“...what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow