Julia Sands

“Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle