Rich

“But then again I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn't like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I'm wondering if without our memories, there's nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

“This is the state to which I shall aspire, where what is important to me is already mine.”
― Rose Tremain, The Colour

“There is a carpet, or a strip of something, that I am walking on...and it is being rolled up behind me. So that there is only the strip I am walking on, with nothing in front or behind me. Sometimes, I am so very tired - but there is no place to rest.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Man Without a Shadow

“What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt—and inflicted for precisely that reason.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending