Jenn

“He was the kind of man for whom everyday life involved a series of evasions; secrets and hiding were second nature to him, subtle vanishing acts. He valued his privacy so much he didn’t even like being asked how he was.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“Due to the unearthly flatness where a city had been famously incinerated, the events he already called his life were growing inconsiderable before he had practised making them important. This derived from a sense not of proportion but of profound chaos, a welter in which his own lucky little order appeared miraculous but inconsequential; and from a revelation, nearly religious, that the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“We’re not one thing. We’re people. The worst of us has good in him. The best of us has pure fucking evil in his heart. We battle. It’s all we can do.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“The loss of empathy is also the loss of humanity, and that's no small tradeoff.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson : Essays from Now or Never