Hannah

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

“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)

“Volume II, Chapter 4
"How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted its shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call "life,"—that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture. To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms; fraud must have lain in wait for us; the artful must have deceived us; sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days; hilarity and joy, that lap the soul in ecstasy, must at times have possessed us. Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nights of festivity; I have joined in ambitious hopes, and exulted in victory: now,—shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me from the troubled scene enacted within its precincts. Let us live for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave "life," that we may live.”
― Mary Shelley, The Last Man

“False was all this - false all but the affections of our nature, and the links of sympathy with pleasure or pain. There was but one good and one evil in the world - life and death. The pomp of rank, the assumption of power, the possessions of wealth vanished like morning mist. One living beggar had become of more worth than a national peerage of dead lords - alas the day! than of dead heroes, patriots, or men of genius. There was much of degradation in this: for even vice and virtue had lost their attributes - life - life - the continuation of our animal mechanism - was the Alpha and Omega of the desires, the prayers, the prostrate ambition of human race.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man