Joy

“The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner