Nic

“But there were necessary accommodations, there always had been; Nick in old times, had been the first to own it.... How they had laughed at the Perpendicular People, the people who went by on the other side (since you couldn’t be a good Samaritan without stooping over and poking into heaps of you didn’t know what)! And now Nick had suddenly become perpendicular....

Susy, that evening, at the head of the dinner table, saw--in the breaks between her scudding thoughts--the nauseatingly familiar faces of the people she called her friends: Strefford, Fred Gillow, a giggling fool of a young Breckenridge, of their New York group, who had arrived that
day, and Prince Nerone Altineri, Ursula’s Prince, who, in Ursula’s absence at a tiresome cure, had, quite simply and naturally, preferred to join her husband at Venice. Susy looked from one to the other of them, as if with newly-opened eyes, and wondered what life would be like
with no faces but such as theirs to furnish it....

Ah, Nick had become perpendicular!... After all, most people went through life making a given set of gestures, like dance-steps learned in advance. If your dancing manual told you at a given time to be perpendicular, you had to be, automatically--and that was Nick!”
― Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon

“Loving someone and serving them were two different things. Clearly, Flower had never been a maid.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, All Hail Chaos

“For there is always light,
If only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“Death played the empty chord”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music