Gabriella

“[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

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

“It seemed, rather, a way, like many, to convince oneself that there is always a slender branch of one's life to hang on to, and, by being suspended there, get used to the inevitability of falling.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“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