Gabriella

“The minute poverty ends, avarice begins.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions

“Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death, who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call ‘knowing it’ as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace ‘we all must die’ transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness ‘I must die, and soon.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Getting lost is death, he can see that. No, this whole place is death. No, that’s unfair—this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him. He feels somewhat deranged.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“[H]aving early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch