Elizabeth Vanderwoude

“that day, at that hour, there took place in her heart a complete severance from all her old life, and a quite different, new, utterly strange life had begun for her,”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina