Sage

“I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“It’s just that, as well as love, you also have to know how to kill.”
― Magda Szabó, The Door

“Small animals are a great problem. I wish God had never created small animals, or else that He had made them so they could talk, or else that He'd given them better faces. Space. Take moths. They fly at the lamp and burn themsleves, and then they fly right back again. It can't be instinct, because it isn't the way it works. They just don't understand, so they go right on doing it. Then they lie on their backs and all their legs quiver, and then they're dead. Did you get all that? Does it sound good?"
"Very good," Grandmother said.
Sophia stood up and shouted, "Say this: say I hate everything that dies slow! Say I hate everything that won't let you help! Did you write that?”
― Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

“At that point she took her hands away from her face, sliding them slowly over her skin: a painful movement that was intended to wipe away the tears and at the same time deliberately show me her grief, without embarrassment but, rather, as a medal... At my house, it was a duty to hide your feelings, not to seem impolite. Whereas she, after seventeen years-- what seemed an eternity to me-- was still in despair, wept in front of the tomb, spoke to the marble, addressed bones she couldn't even see, a man who no longer existed.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults