Joy

“Alleyn asked for an adjournment; the whole affair ended, leaving the onlookers with a sense of having been served with treason when they ordered murder.”
― Ngaio Marsh, A Man Lay Dead

“Do you read crime fiction?”

“I dote on it. It’s such a relief to escape from one’s work into an entirely different atmosphere.”

“It’s not as bad as that,” Nigel protested.

“Perhaps not quite as bad as that. Any faithful account of police investigations, in even the most spectacular homicide case, would be abysmally dull. I should have thought you’d seen enough of the game to realise that. The files are a plethora of drab details, most of them entirely irrelevant. Your crime novelist gets over all that by writing grandly about routine work and then selecting the essentials. Quite rightly. He’d be the world’s worst bore if he did otherwise.”
― Ngaio Marsh, The Nursing Home Murder

“...feeling that old thrill of dread and compulsion, he knew circumstances had once again put him too close to a fragile thing. He said, "Look at the life we live, Della. I have to sneak over here in the dark just to steal a few words with you. Is that language, or is it noise?"

She said, "It's noise that you have to do it, and language that you do it, anyway." She said softly, "Maybe poetry.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“When it happens, pure leisure should feel like play, not work. You won’t be worrying about whether everyone else is having a good time; you won’t be lumped with the labor—physical, mental, or emotional—of planning, delegating, and cleaning up; you won’t be doing it out of obligation, because you know it’s good for you. Pure leisure requires a deliberate choice to carve out nonpurposive time just for yourself. For women, Schulte explains, that’s “nothing less than a courageous—subversive, almost—act of resistance.” But shouldn’t that feel good?”
― Tabitha Carvan, This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It