Alma

“That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot of air.
And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple
form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this:
Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.
It's a cliché translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words
but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists - in a paperweight, in
four red and white balls on a pool table - and we go on living and
breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.”
― John Irving, In One Person