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“NO TOLERANT PERSON OR SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT IS AN ADVOCATE FOR LOVE OR LIFE OR PEACE.”
― Andrea Gibson, Take Me With You

“It’s been a very long two months. She’d been a lot younger, two months ago. She’d been walking steadily on a plateau, for years, through her sixties into her seventies, but now she’s suddenly taken a step down. That’s what happens. She knows all about it. She’s been warned many times about this downwards step, this lower shelf. It’s not a cliff of fall, but it’s a descent to a new kind of plateau, to a lower level. You hope to stay there on the flat for a few more years, but you may not be so lucky.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises

“She wanted people to be as splendid as the countryside, as noble as the mountains, as variable within the limits of beauty as the Firth of Forth, and this was what they were really like. She wept undisguisedly.”
― Rebecca West, The Judge

“Everywhere you went you heard the water, the same way you had always heard your breathing, and would later hear the highway, or trains, or women’s voices. But the sound was so much a part of everything that you couldn’t hear it at all then. This is what I took for granted: The sound of the water. The light on the water, day or night. The way you could look out for so long you couldn’t tell the difference between the water and the sky. The sand that blew onto the highway in sheets and formed small dunes against the curbs. The smell of the water. The tough grass that grew from nothing.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars