Cecilia

“She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”

240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“I consider it a mutual duty, that we owe to each other, to communicate in a spirit of the utmost frankness and candor. Let it ever be done with unlocked hearts.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“The night was aromatic with the smell of autumn and the steely fragrance of freshly dampened blacktop. How she loved the smell of road: asphalt baking and soft in July, dirt roads with their dust-and-pollen perfume in June, country lanes spicy with the odor of crushed leaves in sober October, the sand-and-salt smell of the highway, so like an estuary, in February.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2