Scott Michener

“If you tell me you don’t want to be with me, I might feel very hurt and humiliated, but I’m not going to start begging and pleading with you. At some level, I actually think you know I won’t. But then you get left with the impression that I don’t love you, or I don’t want you, because you’re not getting this response from me—this response that you basically know you won’t get, because I’m not the type of person who can give it to you. I don’t know. I’m not excusing myself, and I’m not excusing Alice. I know you think I’m always defending her, and I suppose when I do that I’m really defending myself, to be honest. Because I see myself in her, and I feel sorry for her. I can see her pushing you away, even though she doesn’t want to, and it hurts her. And I know how that feels.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Now,” he said, “now we’re away, now we’re clear, we’re clean gone, Tenar. Do you feel it?” She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free. What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan