Hannah

“the practice of solitude had given him a love for it, as happens with every big thing which we have begun by fearing, because we knew it to be incompatible with smaller things to which we clung, and of which it does not so much deprive us as it detaches us from them. Before we experience it, our whole preoccupation is to know to what extent we can reconcile it with certain pleasures which cease to be pleasures as soon as we have experienced it.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes)

“It was not the mixture, O men, of blood and breath that made the beginning and substance of your souls, though your earthborn and mortal body is framed of those things. But your soul has come hither from another place.”
― Empedocles

“Everyone had another sort of life up their sleeve that might have made them happy.”
― Liane Moriarty, Truly Madly Guilty

“Let us not, my friends, be wheedled and cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal porridge, whoever they are that attempt it. Let us wait a little, and not purchase any clearing here, trusting that richer bottoms will soon be put up. It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere than this.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers