Kathy Nelson

“I'm always so glad,' Sylvie murmured, 'that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.'
'You're very good at being yourself,' Ursula said, aware that it didn't necessarily sound like a compliment.
'Well, I've had years of practice.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might learn as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being..”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“He was born a politician.
No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life