Amit

“The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“Reality is merely one-tenth visible section of the iceberg that one sees above the surface of the ocean - art remaining nine-tenths of it that lies below the surface. That is why it is more near Truth than Reality itself. Art does not merely reflect Reality - it enlarges it.”
― Anita Desai

“Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“She read newspapers, but preferred books with stories that she could compare with her own life. She read the books I was reading, first Fallada, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, then Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. What she said about books could not have been put into print; she merely told me what had particularly caught her attention. “I’m not like that”, she sometimes said, as though the author had written about her. To her, every book was an account of her own life, and in reading she came to life; for the first time, she came out of her shell; she learned to talk about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject. Little by little, I learned something about her.”
― Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams