Jasmine

“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“There are jokes about breast surgeons.
You know-- something like-- I've seen more breasts in this city than--
I don't know the punch line.
There must be a punch line.

I'm not a man who falls in love easily. I've been faithful to my
wife. We fell in love when we were twenty-two. We had plans. There
was justice in the world. There was justice in love. If a person was
good enough, an equally good person would fall in love with that
person. And then I met-- Ana. Justice had nothing to do with it.

There once was a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was
married to a nurse. He loved her-- immeasurably. One day Halsted
noticed that his wife's hands were chapped and red when she came back
from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is
one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between
inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.

When I met Ana, I knew:
I loved her to the point of invention.”
― Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House and Other Plays

“That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin