Chessy

“I have said before: It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“I followed her, because as I have already said, when I am with my sister I see things from her point of view rather than my own, am compelled to enter her vision, as I used to be compelled to enter her room when we were children, always believing it to be superior to my own. And as we stood out in the street making sure that her car was intact, which of course it was, I became aware of this feeling of having deserted my own life, as once I would desert my room; and I was suddenly filled with the most extraordinary sense of existence as a secret pain, an inner torment it was impossible to share with others, who asked you to attend to them while remaining oblivious to what was inside you, like the mermaid in the fairy story who walks on knives that no one else can see.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“You asked what I count each evening and each morning. What I counted each day in prison while better men withered and died. Do you know the sums that I do?” Gamache stood still, in case moving would scare this man off and he’d never have his answer. But he knew he needn’t worry. This man was afraid of nothing. “I count my blessings.” He turned and saw Irene on the terrasse, as though he’d sensed her there. “We’re all blessed and we’re all blighted, Chief Inspector,” said Finney. “Every day each of us does our sums. The question is, what do we count?”
― Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder