Ben

“After I couldn't remember any more except in a general way what she looked like, I could still remember the sound of her voice, and I clung to that.
I also clung to the idea that if things remained exactly the way they were, if we were careful not to take a step in any direction from the place where we were now, we would somehow get back to the way it was before she died. I knew that this was not a rational belief, but the alternative - that when people die they are really gone and I would never see her again - was more than I could manage then or for a long time afterward.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“He had tried so hard, had done his very best; why wouldn't she allow him to forget? He squeezed her limp hand almost with violence, as though he would force her to come back from this dream of ignoble pleasures, from these base and hateful memories--back into the present, back into reality: the appalling present, the awful reality--but sublime, but significant, but desperately important precisely because of the imminence of that which made them so fearful.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The unpaved street we were now living on had no past and no future but only a wan present in which it was hard to think of anything to do.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we're dead. Making plants grow.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World