Theo

“If someone had asked me about Lucille I would remember her with her mass of soft, fine, tangly hair concealing ears that cupped a bit and grew painfully cold if she did not cover them. I would remember that her front teeth, the permanent ones, came in, first one and much later the other, immense and raggedly serrated, and that she was fastidious about washing her hands. I would remember that when irked she bit her lip, when shy she scratched her knee, that she smelled dully clean, like chalk, or like a sun-warmed cat.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“I longed for a feeling again, a particular one: the one of approaching a room but of not yet having entered it. Being engaged to marry, it should have been what I felt. But instead I associated the feeling with another part of my life: that anteroom of girlhood, with its laughter as yet only affianced to the world, anticipation playing in the heart like an orchestra tuning and warming, the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed—I wanted it back!—those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“She thinks of Dixie with excited identity as being some adult part of herself divorced from her by transfiguring years, like a very sunburned arm which might not appear familiar if you had been unconscious of its alterations.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz

“Nora will leave that girl some day; but though those two were buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood