Polly Kourepi

“It flashed through her like the sudden apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure [...] and for the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own desires,—of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. [...] She sat in the deepening twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness; and in the ardor of new discovery, renunciation seemed to her an entrance into that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. She had not perceived—how could she until she had lived longer?—the inmost truth of the old monk’s outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss