Emma Hartman

“I must try and be good, or clever, or eccentric, for it was very evident that pretty I could never be”
― Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up As a Flower

“He'd known of her, of course; everyone in the neighborhood knew of Katie. She was that beautiful. But few people really knew her. Beauty could do that; it scared you off, made you keep your distance. It wasn't like in the movies where the camera made beauty seem like something that invited you in. In the real world, beauty was like a fence to keep you out, back you off.”
― Dennis Lehane, Mystic River

“Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. and it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“This is America . . . where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young”
― Dennis Lehane, Gone, Baby, Gone