Jeania

“—It wasn’t a bother at all, the old gent replied, gesturing toward his bed. I was only reading. Ah, I thought, seeing the corner of the book poking out from the folds of his sheets. I should have known. The poor old chap, he suffers from the most dangerous addiction of all.”
― Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

“Get a move on, Perico, and go ask him for the battery charger," and the apprentice hurried out, but everything was like a dream and what was the point of any of it: battery chargers, wrenches, mechanics, and he felt sorry for the terrified little boy because, he thought, all of us are dreaming and why punish kids and why fix cars and have crushes on nice boys and then get married and have children who also dream that they're alive, who have to suffer, go off to war or fight or give up hope all on account of mere dreams. He was simply drifting along now, like a boat without a crew swept along by shifting currents, and moving mechanically like those invalids who have lost almost all will and consciousness and yet allow themselves to be moved by the nurses and obey the instructions they are given with the obscure remains of that will and that consciousness without knowing why. The 493, he thought, I go as far as Chacarita and then I take the subway to Florida and then I walk from there to the hotel. So he got on the 493 and mechanically asked for a ticket, and for half an hour continued to see ghosts dreaming of things that kept them very busy; at the Florida stop he went out the exit on the Calle San Martin, walked along the Corrientes to Reconquista and from there headed for the Warszawa rooming house, Accommodations for Gentlemen, went up dirty, dilapidated stairs to the fourth floor, and threw himself on the wretched bed as though he had been wandering through labyrinths for centuries.”
― Ernesto Sabato

“Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship—camaraderie—usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“He and she belonged to each other for always: he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again wholly let them go.”
― Edith Wharton, Glimpses of the Moon