Efsun Ecem

“And the idea of him ever since. . . . Our feelings about people change as we grow up: but if we are left with an idea instead of a person, perhaps that never changes. After every mistake Charles made, I expect you thought: 'Vesey wouldn't have done that.' But an idea can't ever make mistakes. He led a perfect life in your brain. When he turned up again, the climate was right for him, tempered by your imagination. But his climate isn't right for you.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“It’s the hardest addiction of all,’ said Patrick. ‘Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, At Last

“The deeper the soul plunges into religious religious devotion, the more it loses all sense of reality, all need, all desire, all love for reality.”
― André Gide, The Counterfeiters

“The next morning, the thirty-three-year-old bachelor with an irascible character, who had so passionately deflowered the twenty-two-year-old neighbor girl Berta Faust, promised himself he would make sure that —as soon as this nightmarish war was over— the broodingly shy Berta with the vast astonishment in her eyes would get a man with Alban Bergian faithfulness and Beethovenesque rigor.”
― Marianne Fritz, The Weight of Things