Elena StB

“Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.” When someone said, “I want to go home,” what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“This might sound like a banal opinion, but the world can turn upside down, depending on the way we look at it. The way a ray of sunshine falls on something can change shadow to light, or light to shadow. A positive becomes a negative, a negative a positive. I don’t know if this is an essential part of the way the world works, or simply an optical illusion.”
― Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular: Stories

“She had the sudden vivid realization that each choice, each split-second decision she had made until that moment, was what had made her life. She had shaped her life daily, the way a painter chooses pigments and lays down one brushstroke after another on the canvas. Whether she would die here, at the hands of the Russians, or be cut down in a senseless attempt to escape, she was comforted. She had, at least, been the artist of her own existence.”
― Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote

“Life can look like a series of foregone decisions”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel