Claretha Commons

“Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”
― Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

“You're the best man I ever met," I said. "I only meant...it's such a strain, to try and live for two people. To try to make them fit your ideas of what's right...You do it for a child, of course, you have to, but even then, it's dreadfully hard work. I couldn't do it for you - it would be wrong even to try."
I'd taken him back more than a little. He sat for some moments, his face turned half away.
Do ye really think me a good man?" he said at last. There was a queer note in his voice, that I couldn't quite decipher.
Yes," I said, with no hesitation. Then added, half jokingly, "Don't you?"
After a long pause, he said, quite seriously, "No, I shouldna think so."
I looked at him speechless, no doubt with my mouth hanging open.
I am a violent man, and I ken it well," he said quietly. He spread his hands out on his knees; big hands, which could wield a sword and dagger with ease, or choke the life from a man. " So do you - or ye should."
You've never done anything you weren't forced to do!"
No?"
I don't think so." I said, but even as I spoke, a shadow of doubt clouded my words. Even when done from the most urgent necessity, did such things not leave a mark on the soul?

{Claire Fraser & Jamie Fraser. Drums of Autumn}”
― Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn

“I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living,
my baby you'll be.”
― Robert N. Munsch, Love You Forever

“I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth