Catherine

“Sometimes it's exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I've lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn't kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn't simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it's gone, nothing is whole again.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Look at it, a whole drawerful, men and women, every one of them a real executive, or auditor, or manager of some business, and when I recommend one, I know somebody is getting something for his money. They're all home, sitting by their phones, hoping I'll call. I won't call. I've got nothing to tell them. What I'm trying to get through your head is: You haven't got a chance. Those people, it hurts me, it makes me lie awake nights, that I've got nothing for them. They deserve something, and there's not a thing I can do. But there's not a chance I'd slip you ahead of any one of them. You're not qualified. There's not a thing on earth you can do, and I hate people that can't do anything.”
― James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce

“She drank like a drowning man helplessly swallowing sea water, in accordance with some law of nature. To ask for nothing means that one has lost one’s freedom to choose or reject. Once having decided that, one has no choice but to drink anything — even sea water….

Afterwards, however, Etsuko felt none of the nausea of a drowning person. Until the moment of her death, it seemed, no one would know she was drowning. She did not call out — she was a woman bound and gagged by her own hand.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love