Hope

“My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession