Emily

“It was a still afternoon - the golden light was lingering languidly among the upper boughs, only glancing down here and there on the purple pathway and its edge of faintly sprinkled moss; an afternoon in which destiny disguises her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant veil, encloses us in warm downy wings, and poisons us with violet-scented breath.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“She had no tears this morning. She had wept them all away last night, and now she felt that dry-eyed morning misery, which is worse than the first shock, because it has the future in it as well as the present. Every morning to come, as far as her imagination could stretch, she would have to get up and feel that the day would have no joy for her. For there is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“Strange that only a little problem of your own will take your mind far from a tragedy belonging to others.”
― Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History