Elena

“Мне казалось, это в порядке вещей. Я тогда не знала, что это был рай. Что такое рай, понимаешь только когда его утратишь, а что такое гнездо – когда из него выпадешь.”
― Jean-Claude Mourlevat, Winter's End

“The bride and her mother could neither of them talk fast enough;”
― Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice

“I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently. I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“But the ultimate truth is that they aren't dead, those people. The writers of books do not truly die; their characters, even the ones who throw themselves in front of trains or are killed in battle, come back to life over and over again. Books are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heathcliff wanders the moors searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale. Through them all we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is catafalque.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life