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“I am become a sour woman, Catelyn thought. I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“I hold nothing dear. Not the place where I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life.”
― Han Kang, The White Book

“At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd. A sealed chamber carrying all the memories of the life i have lived, and the mother tongue from which they are inseparable. The more stubborn the isolation, the more vivid these unlooked-for fragments, the more oppressive their weight. So that it seems the place i flee to is not so much a city on the other side of the world as further into my own interior”
― Han Kang, The White Book

“Crown shyness is so striking, don’t you think?”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy