Karen Woolf

“Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries.”
― Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

“Is it possible for home to be a person and not a place?”
― Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss

“You know what I was thinking? [Ruthie] got so excited when she was spouting this ahistorical countertextual nonsense, and I caught myself thinking, 'What an idiot her teacher must be,' and thinking about her teacher made me realize - the kind of excitement she was showing as she mindlessly spouted back the nonsense she learned in college, that's just like the excitement some of my own students show. And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a 'brilliant student' is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we've been teaching them."

"Self-knowledge is a painful thing," said Esther. "To learn that your best students are parrots after all.”
― Orson Scott Card, Enchantment

“Those who are happy and successful themselves are too apt to make light of the misfortunes of others.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South