Carolyn

“Such questions were a recent habit Ruby had developed. She seemed to delight in demonstrating how disoriented Ada was in the world. As they walked by the creek one day she had asked, What's the course of that water? Where does it come from and what does it run into? Another day she had said, Name me four plants on that hillside that in a pinch you could eat. How many days to the next new moon? Name two things blooming now, and two things fruiting.

Ada did not yet have those answers, but she could feel them coming, and Ruby was her principal text.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“I wanted an imagination that would inhabit a world of fact, descend like a shining light upon the ordinary life of Eden Street, and not force me to exist in an "elsewhere". I wanted the light to shine upon the pigeons of Grey Street, the plum trees in our garden, the two japonica bushes (one red, one yellow), our pine plantations and gully, our summer house, our lives, and our home, the world of Oamaru, the kingdom by the sea. I refused to accept that if I were to fulfil my secret ambition to be a poet, I should spend my imaginative life among the nightingales instead of among the wax-eyes and the fantails. I wanted my life to be the "other world".”
― Janet Frame, To the Is-land: An Autobiography

“I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray