Sophia

“She has no name for that feeling of utter abandonment, nor the feeling that comes over her on fair days, when she stands in the courtyard from the photo, and the voice of the loudspeaker booms front behind the trees, and the music and commercials run together in an unintelligible blur. It is as if she were standing outside the fete, separated from some earlier thing.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Années

“Her inward calm was not shattered; but she felt sad and once she even burst into tears—she did not know why, but the insult she had suffered was certainly not the cause. She did not feel insulted: on the contrary, she had a feeling of guilt. The pressure of various conflicting emotions—an awareness that her life was on the decline, a longing for novelty—had brought her to the brink of an abyss; and as she peered over it, she saw no abyss but only a void…a shapeless chaos.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you'd been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you're nothing once again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“Free from all prejudice, she yet lacked strong convictions; and though she was not put off by obstacles, she had no goal in life. She had clear ideas about many things and a variety of interests, but nothing ever fully satisfied her; nor were they ever allowed to provoke a state of inner alarm. If she had not been rich and independent, she might have thrown herself into the battle of life, experienced passion…But she had an easy life, boring as it may sometimes have been, and continued to pursue her daily round without haste or undue agitation.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons