Barbette

“But sooner or later you have to do something. If you think you're going to find one thing that will be perfect for you, you're going to spend your eightieth birthday reading the want ads.”
― Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Sensing her hard separateness in their separate footsteps as they walked towards her home in the sleeping suburbs, he began to feel that by now there should be more between them than this sensual ease. Till now, for him, the luxury of this ease had been perfect. This uncomplicated pleasure seemed the very fullness of life, seemed all that life could yearn towards, and yet it could not go one forever. There comes a point in all living things when they must change or die, and maybe they had passed that point already without noticing, and that already he had lost her, when he was longing to draw closer.”
― John McGahern, Getting Through