Kitty Dulin

“Only then did he understand clearly for the first time what he had not understood when he had led her out of the church after the wedding. He understood not only that she was close to him, but that he no longer knew where she ended and he began. He understood it by the painful feeling of being split which he experienced at that moment. He was offended at first, but in that same instant he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was him.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Where she had suffered so much.’ Alas! And that was the way in which the eighteen months in Milton – to him so unspeakably precious, down to its very bitterness, which was worth all the rest of life’s sweetness – would be remembered. Neither loss of father, nor loss of mother, dear as she was to Mr. Thornton, could have poisoned the remembrance of the weeks, the days, the hours, when a walk of two miles, every step of which was pleasant, as it brought him nearer and nearer to her, took him to her sweet presence – every step of which….he could never have spoken of that time, when he could have seen her every day – when he had her within his grasp, as it were – as a time of suffering.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn't writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone.”
― Marilynne Robinson