Kapil

“A golden cage is still a cage.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“If patience wasn’t so easily tested, then it would hardly be a virtue. . . ”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden," Jacques said. And then: "I wonder why."
...
Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road--and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright--and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.
... Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another type of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of the pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“That's what happens when you free people from the restraints of time. They make their own rigid schedule.”
― Keigo Higashino, The Devotion of Suspect X