Suzie

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, ore kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's ind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the tie, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle