Laura

“Another silence. He was standing very still now. Was it a trick of the mist or was he really a very long way away from me, a lonely figure in the queerly-lit darkness? It came to me suddenly that this was how I would always remember him, someone standing alone, apart from the others even of his own family. And, I think for the first time, I began to see him as he really was—not any more as a projection of my young romantic longings, not any more as Prince Charming, the handsome sophisticate, the tiger I thought I preferred. . . . This was Raoul, who had been a quiet, lonely little boy in a house that was "not a house for children," an unhappy adolescent brought up in the shadowof a megalomaniac father, a young man fighting bitterly to save his small inheritance from ruin . . . wild, perhaps, hard, perhaps, plunging off the beaten track more than once . . . but always alone. Wrapped up in my loneliness and danger I hadn't even seen that his need was the same as my own. He and I had hoed the same row, and he for a more bitter harvest.”
― Mary Stewart, NINE COACHES WAITING

“He's always been suspicious of excitement - nothing he anticipates is ever worth the wait or turns out quite the same as he expects - but still, it's coursing through him like a medicine. If it's true that better luck will come to you through patience and determination, he's not felt the benefits of that approach so far.”
― Benjamin Wood, Seascraper

“I have known her from a child, undoubtedly; we have been children and women together; and it is natural to suppose that we should be intimate,—that we should have taken to each other whenever she visited her friends. But we never did. I hardly know how it has happened; a little, perhaps, from that wickedness on my side which was prone to take disgust towards a girl so idolized and so cried up as she always was, by her aunt and grandmother, and all their set. And then, her reserve—I never could attach myself to any one so completely reserved.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Capitalism, when a crisis hits, tends to be restructured. New technologies, new organisational forms, new modes of exploitation, new types of jobs, and new markets all emerge to create a new way of accumulating capital.”
― Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism