Marie-Anne

“I suspected what was the matter readily enough. But it is a maxim of mine that men (being superior creatures) are bound to improve women — if they can. When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn’t matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn’t their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it’s the fault of the fools who humour them.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“He never really existed at all, except in my imagination,” she thought wearily. “I loved something I made up, something that’s just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn’t see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Shades slithered, doors boomed, keys rattled their bones in locks, people fled with hordes of torn newspaper mice nibbling their heels.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“A sublime state, it was, and it didn’t cost much. The bus stop was only across the street. There was scarcely a chance for his impatience over Campbell’s tiny step to spoil this refreshing nip of fatherhood he took each morning.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities