Salome

“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“We are here, and we have to do something nurturing that we respect before we go. We must. It is more interesting, more complicated, more intellectually demanding and more morally demanding to love somebody, to take care of somebody.”
― Toni Morrison

“...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children