Holly

“I felt that if I could only get to beauty, something speechless and formless would be absolved in me--if I could only get beyond my own hands lathered in soap, chapped from flour and coins, hands which did not touch or receive touch, hands sewing by a circle of lamplight. ...Of course I know now that beauty is relative. Now I can pine for the swallows nesting in the roof of the lavoir, the dry dirt and grass under my feet, the river's winding path. Even a newly mopped flagstone, butter melting on potatoes, a mended white cloth to shake out over a table and set with things gleaming sharp and bright.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, Cursed Bread

“But it isn't simple, being yourself. You have to know yourself physiologically and people don't want to believe the truth about themselves. They get some mental picture of themselves and then they devil the poor old body, trying to make it like the picture. When it won't obey--can't obey, of course--they are mad at it, and live in it as if it were an unsatisfactory house that they were hoping to move out of”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“In the wild, there are two types of cat populations," I tell him when he finishes his move. "Residents and transients. Some stay put, in their fixed home ranges, and others are on the move. They don't have real homes. Everybody always thought that the ones who establish the territories are the most successful--like the capitalists who get ahold of Park Place. They are the strongest, while the transients are the bums, the losers." ... I continue bravely. "The thing is--this is what the scientists are wondering about now--it may be that the transients are the superior ones after all, with the greatest curiosity and most intelligence. They can't decide.”
― Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh and Other Stories

“It was not that she forgot the nature of her thoughts; it was rather that it had never occurred to her that thoughts "counted." In short, Mrs. Quest was like ninety-nine per cent of humanity: if she spent an afternoon jam-making, while her mind was filled with thoughts envious, spiteful, lustful--violent; then she had spent the afternoon making jam.”
― Doris Lessing, Landlocked