Pati

“Oh it was a letter from her! This blue envelope; that was her hand. And he would have to read it. Here was another of those meetings, bound to be painful! To read her letter needed the devil of an effort. 'How heavenly it was to see him. She must tell him that.' That was all. But it upset him. It annoyed him. He wished she hadn't written it. Coming on top of his thoughts, it was like a nudge in the ribs. Why couldn't she let him be? After all, she had married Dalloway, and lived with him in perfect happiness all these years.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“He was crying, because the red marks of the whip on his back still hurt so terribly. But he was also crying because people were so beastly and unfair, and because he was only a boy and couldn’t do anything against them. Linda was crying too. She was grown up, but she wasn’t big enough to fight against three of them. It wasn’t fair for her either.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“But why should she not announce to the family that she was going to change, was in the process of changing? She could not. They would see it as a claim on their attention, their compassion. (...) (That was not how people changed; they didn't change themselves: you got changed by being made to live through something, and then you found yourselve changed.)”
― Doris Lessing, The Summer Before the Dark

“We were virtually attempting to square the circle.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go