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

“I promise to respect and protect your aloneness, knowing that everything created must have its period of darkness: child and bulb, poem and personality. I promise not to pry into your loneliness, never to tear at the bud with frightened fingers to make sure there is a flower inside. I believe in the flower.”
― anne morrow lindbergh

“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