Nicholas Lee

“This is where I learned that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us. Just as there is, in the real landscape of Paris in Les Misérables, that small fictional street Victor Hugo provides for Jean Valjean to slip into, in which to hide from his pursuers.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

“Now we are both lonely, for entirely different reasons, but it feels the same, doesn't it?”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit’s joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false—it is impalpable—it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“ought to have read more, for I find I don’t know anything, and it mortifies me.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women