Gemma

“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“--and yet, whenever he started with the questions I froze stiff, as if I'd been pushed onstage in a play where I didn't know the lines.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch