Emery

“The color painted within the Green Room was known as "sweetdream" and would render you unconscious in twelve minutes and dead in sixteen, but during those twelve minutes every synapse in your brain would fire in a sparkling fountain of pleasure. The cries from the Green Room were never of pain or fear. They were of ecstasy.”
― Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey

“...and though it was three in the morning, and he had to traverse some of the nastiest quarters in Paris, trouble passed him by. Everyone knows that God watches over drunkards and lovers.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

“He seemed very out of breath, placed both items gently on my hall carpet without being asked, and started to take off his jacket, still puffing and blowing like a beached porpoise. Smoking kills.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“For a human life to be meaningful, it must be one in which I am not a spectator but a real participant, and a participant in something that matters to me. [...] For my life to be meaningful, those projects have to feel like _my_ projects: not in the sense that I own them, but more in the sense that they own me, that they have captured my focus.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe