Clara

“It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he's trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or all men's lives like the lives of us good people - like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords - broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“Conversation is the wall we build between ourselves and other people, too often with tired words like used and broken bottles which, catching the sunlight as they lie embedded in the wall, are mistaken for jewels.”
― Janet Frame, Faces In The Water

“A silly lilting wavering tune came from before her in the dusk - a tune in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted into minor sounds, as, beneath a bridge, the high lights on dark waters melt and waver and disappear into black depths.”
― Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion