Elo-Mall Toomet

“But the other tribe — the passionate, tragic, rootless tree — man? Alas! He is a creature whose highest privileges are a curse. In his mouth is ever the bitter-sweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell. For every man worthy of the name is an initiate; but each one into different Mysteries.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“morals involve something more than terminology. Ben damn near lost his mind over the importance of using the proper terms for people in wheelchairs, and he clearly felt pretty proud of himself for doing that, but he didn’t mention ever doing anything useful for one single person in one single wheelchair, and Cal would bet a year’s pension that the little twerp would have brought it up if he had. And on top of that, the right terms change every few years, so that someone who thinks like Ben has to be always listening for other people to tell him what’s moral and immoral now. It seems to Cal that this isn’t how a man, or a woman either, goes about having a sense of right and wrong.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Life's very like a husband you know, my dear; it makes you bring forth fruit.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Castle on the Hill

“He wonders, without necessarily believing in ghosts, whether their ghosts wander. It comes to him that even if they do, even if he were to take up his coat now and go walking the back roads and the mountain sides, he wouldn't meet them. Their lives and their deaths grew out of a land that Cal isn't made from and hasn't sown or harvested, and they've soaked back into that land. He could walk right through those ghosts and never feel their urgent prickle. He wonders if Trey ever meets them, on long walks homewards under the dimming sky.”
― Tana French, The Searcher