Sula

“Mammie was out there in the dark and cold. No one would ever bring her in, to warm and dry and cherish her. There was rain seeping through the earth and into her coffin. Water gets everywhere. It finds a way, no matter how tight the carpenter dovetails his joints. When rain spattered on the windows I could never run to open the door for her, to take off her cloak to dry it by the fire, kneel to take off her boots. She was part of the cold darkness. She would never come in. And here I was, still putting food into my mouth and swallowing it.
I lay bound, as heavy as if I too had the weight of six feet of earth above me.”
― Helen Dunmore, Birdcage Walk

“He paused, looked thoughtfully at her over the cafe table. 'And do I seem unspeakably old?'
She searched for an answer. 'Not old. Different. Like a book with more pages. Ones that I haven't read - and can't read.”
― Penelope Lively, Consequences

“Even the foreseen loss of your parents at a normal age brings shocks you have not bargained for. One is that you must finally face the fact that you are grown up. While they are alive, you can be their child, even in middle age. They stand between you and death. With both of them gone, you are next in line.
But that is nothing compared to the unexpected gap, the vast space, not a desert or emptiness, because a desert has substance, and emptiness implies containment. An infinite nothing.”
― Monica Dickens, An Open Book

“It sometimes seemed to Molly that the library was a place of silent discord and anarchy, its superficial tranquillity concealing a babel of assertion and dispute. Fiction is one strident lie - or rather, many competing lies; history is a long narrative of argument and reassessment; travel shouts of self-promotion; biography is pushing a product. As for autobiography... And all this is just fine. That is the function of books: they offer a point of view, they offer many confliction points of view, they provoke thoughts, they provoke irritation and admiration and speculation. They take you out of yourself and put you down somewhere else from whence you never entirely return. If the library were to speak, Molly felt, if it were to speak with a thousand tongues, there would be a deep collective growl coming from the core collection up on the high shelves, where the voices of the nineteenth century would be setting new precedents, the bleats and cries of new opinion, new fashion, new style, The surface repose of a library is a cynical deception.”
― Penelope Lively, Consequences