Samantha

“So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father's house -- even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that's all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or a parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause and consequence?”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex