Cora

“Some people-and I am one of them-hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“The chief impression produced on Isabel's spirit by this criticism, was that the passion of love separated its victim terribly from everyone but the loved object”
― Henry James

“There's nothing so magnificent - for making others feel you - as to have no imagination.”
― Henry James

“Or she would look at him with a sullen expression, once again he would see before him a face worthy of figuring in Botticelli's Life of Moses, he would place her in it, he would give her neck the necessary inclination; and when he had well and truly painted her in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, the idea that she had nevertheless remained here, by the piano, in the present moment, ready to be kissed and possessed, the idea of her materiality and her life would intoxicate him with such force that, his eyes distracted, his jaw tensed as though to devour her, he would swoop down upon that Botticelli virgin and begin pinching her cheeks.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way