Ash Chapman

“He watched her in the aisles: Molly, his pretty baseball wife, with her ceaseless vigilance for lumps, her insistence on quarterly medical check-ups for him and Willy, her controlled fear of the dark; her hard-bought knowledge that time is luck. She knew the value of their days. She could hold a moment by its stem. She had taught him to relish.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“I didn’t think anything would come of this canvas,’ Crawford said. ‘Well, what the hell did you expect me to do?’ ‘The best you can, that’s all.’ Crawford rose to leave. ‘Busy work’s been a narcotic for me sometimes, especially after I quit the booze. For you too, I think.’ Graham was angry. Crawford was right, of course.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“He had learned a lot of the things sensible human beings are capable of learning, and he was a fairly clever man. One thing he had not learned, however, was to be satisfied with himself and his life. He was incapable of this; he was a dissatisfied human being. This was probably because in the depths of his heart he always knew (or thought he knew) that he wasn’t actually a human being at all, but a wolf of the steppes.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“First, accept that life is hard, and that transforming our life—or our abilities, which amount to much the same thing—is very hard.”
― Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers