Renu

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day-mock me horribly!" The hot tears welled into his eyes; he tore his hand away, and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was praying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Do you know what has occurred to me now? I was comparing you two. Why isn't he you? Why isn't he like you? He is not as good as you, though I love him more than you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“But of course that is because I do not respect myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“It isn’t by throwing things away—and, invariably, replacing them—that we avoid cluttering up our life. It is by holding on to things that have been good and faithful to us. A trusted familiar knows how to live with us, finding its own space, giving us ours, and saves us from the need to hoard and possess that comes from feeling incomplete.”
― Ruskin Bond, A Book of Simple Living: Brief Notes from the Hills