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“Every heart has its own skeletons.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden