Jonathan Stroud

“Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth