Allie

“He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist’s arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom the present is eternal, beings that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

“Are you tired?” he said, looking at me closely. Was I? I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma. “If you’d rather have company? Perhaps if I build a fire in the other room? Tell me what you want.” At this question, I felt a sharp rush of despair—for as bad as I felt there was nothing he could do for me, and from his face, I realized he knew that, too.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I remember this lunch in great detail because I remember it as being the last time he was happy-Dad with me.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn’t any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn’t any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That’s the power structure he’s part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed