Sage

“Emerence no longer wished to live, because we'd destroyed the framework of her life and the legend attached to her name. She had been everyone's model, everyone's help, the supreme exemplar. Out of her starched apron pockets came sugar cubes wrapped in paper and linen handkerchiefs rustling like doves. She was the Snow Queen. She stood for certainty - in summer the first ripening cherry, in autumn the thud of falling chestnuts, the golden roast pumpkin of winter, and, in spring, the first bud on the hedgerow.”
― 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

“Everything that I could see was beautiful. I cried and cried, standing there, surrounded by that beauty, even though I wasn’t standing anywhere. I could hear the sound of my own tears. Everything was beautiful. Not that there was anyone to share it with, anyone to tell. Just the beauty.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“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.