Rachael

“As to Death, when I was young, personal immortality seemed to me axiomatic. The mere thought of Death made me furious. I was so intensely alive I felt I could defy any one, anything—God, or demon, or Fate herself—to put me out. All that is changed now. If I think of Death at all it is merely as a negation of life, a close, a last and necessary chord. What I dread is disease, that is, bad, disordered life, not Death, and disease, so far, I have escaped. I have no hope whatever of personal immortality, no desire even for a future life. My consciousness began in a very humble fashion, with my body; with my body, very quietly, I hope it will end.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“Above all, love must be freely given, by mutual consent on both sides, through the exercise of free will. Because it is thus freely chosen, it is an act of humanity and civilisation, neither a daemonic possession such as hurled Dido upon her funeral pyre or Medea upon her children, not the base stirrings of concupiscence.”
― Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary

“Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.”
― Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers