Mrs. Danvers

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“The distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

From Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets series, published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781, on Alexander Pope”
― Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1

“That Episcopal day school Marin attended from the age of four until she entered Berkeley had as its aim "the development of a realistic but optimistic attitude," and it was characteristic of Charlotte that whenever the phrase "realistic but optimistic" appeared in a school communique she read it as "realistic and optimistic.”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer