Samuel

“But that’s what happened, Freeman, who had often been in love, told himself. Until you were lovers you were strangers.”
― Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel

“And another thing. Don’t ever kid yourself about loving some one. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory—to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing.”
― Philip Roth, Patrimony: A True Story