Jody

“Being the firstborn gives you great patience. But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say, Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“I turned off the projector and Alex mumbled something in her sleep and turned over. I said, "Everything is fine, I'm going home now," and said it just so I could say I'd said it in case she was upset later that I'd left without telling her. I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn't just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they'd faded from the photograph.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“She was wilful, maddening, quarrelsome and intolerant, but somehow these things were trifling: there was a passion inside her that burned like a candle in a lantern, and it lit up his life.”
― Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth