Tavie

“You scrape yourself out of bed, exhausted from all you tried to do over the weekend, from trying to waste not so much as a quarter of an hour of the two days allotted for your real life. The life you were supposed to have is lived in tiny slices of time between each night’s dinner and sleep, and in those two precious days you pay for by working the other five for someone else’s dreams.”
― Lori Berhon, Under the Bus

“People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel -- before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“There was something about Christmas Eve, they both felt, that demanded company; one needed somebody to whisper to, during the warm beautiful dream-taut moments between hanging the empty stocking at the end of the bed, and dropping into the cosy oblivion that would flower into the marvel of Christmas morning.”
― Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising

“People say, ‘I suppose you got bored with life,’ but it wasn’t as sudden as that. The seeds are in you and although it may take ten, twenty, or forty years, eventually you can do what you wanted to do at the beginning.”
― Margaret Powell, Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid's Memoir That Inspired "Upstairs, Downstairs" and "Downton Abbey"