Summer

“It's because people are so perishable. That's the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outwards from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there's blurry bits, like you're looking through this watery haze, and you're fighting to see, you're fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.”
― Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“She had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty.”
― m. somerset maugham