Eileen

“It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.”
― Alice Munro, Dear Life

“In a moment a world will lose its focus and become a different place. They say that blind people have been struck by their affliction without warning, and that Helen Keller found language and light in a word. For me, I suddenly knew, viscerally at least, a number of things about my town that I’d only ever suspected. The dog was a girl. The dog was a native girl. I dug her out of the snow with more care than I’d ever lifted a porcupine or a snapping rat, and feeling that she was still somewhat warm, that her wrappings of rags had protected her from the cold of a Manitoba winter, I placed my jacket around her and covered her head with my hat. Then I set a pace back to the farm that left a taste of blood in my mouth, freezing my lungs by running at minus thirty.”
― Barry Pomeroy

“Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007