Ekin

“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Depersonalization like the deposing of useless individuality— the loss of everything that can be lost, while still being. To take away from yourself little by little, with an effort so attentive that no pain is felt, to take away from yourself like one who gets free of her own skim, her own characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way I am most easily viewed by others and end up being superficially recognizable to myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“A novel is interested in how one thing follows another; it is equally (arguably more) interested in what it feels like to live in time; in life lived by intensity. As a treatment of time, a novel activates not only curiosity in the reader (And then?) but memory: a form of attention that is accumulative as well as anticipatory, backward-reaching as well as forward-facing and itself capable of acting on time. That is, of repeating or extending the strategies of the narration. By skipping a bit of it. Or staying with it. Thickening it by reading a passage again.”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form