Neer

“After you were born, someone turned on a tap. At first it was only a drip, a black drip, and I felt it as sadness. I had felt sad before . . . who hasn’t? I knew what it was like. But I didn’t know that it would come like that, for no reason. I lived with it for weeks.’ ‘Was there a drain?’ ‘No. There was no drain. There isn’t one even now.’ She was quiet for a bit. ‘It’s like oil. Like molasses, slow at first. Then one morning I woke up and it was flowing free and fast. I thought I would drown in it. I thought it would drown little you, and Susan. So I got up and got dressed and went out onto the road and tried to jump in front of a bus. I thought it would be a final thing, quick, like a bang. Only, it wasn’t.”
― Jerry Pinto, Em and the Big Hoom

“Do we only really live in times of emotion?”
― Doreen Wallace, The Time of Wild Roses

“I was not disturbed by the fact that the memories made me nostalgic, because I could never bring back the events, or that they made me sad, because they reflected only the positive side of experiences that had their negative side as well. Such is always the case with happy memories. What disturbed me was that they made me more than nostalgic and sad: they made me tired. Deeply, dumbly, blackly tired. (141)”
― Bernhard Schlink, Homecoming

“Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet around a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders and blood.”
― Jerome K. Jerome