Thomas

“People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another—for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy