Janine

“All of my joys have been pulled out of my mouth like teeth. All my home is nothing but sadness and silence and ruin and memory. I have been reduced, I am my own ghost, all my own beauty and youth have shrilled away, there are no illusions of happiness to impel me. Life is a prison of poverty and aborted dreams, it is nothing but a slow progress to my place beneath the soil.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“She could not say why; he just seemed like the kind of man who healed, rather than wounded.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: “Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.” Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity— which I wonder whether I belong to —really had a very vivid imagination.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others -- why they must dream up new and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere, beyond this dominion...All I ever wanted was to know *this* world.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things