=^._.^=

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure … She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“But peace returns to my heart.
Not peace as it used to be
before it left me years ago. It went away to school,
matured as I did,
and came back looking like me.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“Pride is a funny thing; it can make what is truly worthless appear to be a treasure. As soon as you let go of it, pride shrinks to the size of a fly, but one that has no head, and no tail, and no wings with which to lift itself off the ground.”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“Place is of consequence only to the extent that it encourages or demands the confrontation of the self by the self, which is solitude's true vocation.”
― Sue Halpern, Migrations to Solitude: The Quest for Privacy in a Crowded World