Isa

“I felt as if this pain would never be appeased, that it had me in its grip for ever, that it would prevent me from devoting myself to anything else, and that I was allowing it to do so. I think that is what they call being consumed with remorse.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Ideas can be killed," she says, stepping into the airlock.

"How?"

"With better ideas.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“Johnny was dead. But he wasn't. That still body back in the hospital wasn't Johnny. Johnny was somewhere else—maybe asleep in the lot, or playing the pinball machine in the bowling alley, or sitting on the back steps of the church in Windrixville. I'd go home and walk by the lot, and Johnny would be sitting on the curb smoking a cigarette, and maybe we'd lie on our backs and watch the stars. He isn't dead, I said to myself. He isn't dead. And this time my dreaming worked. I convinced myself that he wasn't dead.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery - as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.”
― Frank Herbert