Stacey

“It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“I often look forward to a time when there won't be anything left to grow attached to. I'm tired of everything being taken away from me. Yet there's no escape, for as long as there's something for me to love in the forest, I shall love it; and if some day there is nothing, I shall stop living.”
― Marlen Haushofer, The Wall