Ann

“He used his delicate sorrows as a battering ram, smashing his way into people’s hearts, where he could reside until he was bored, taking what he wanted.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence.”
― Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch: A novel

“When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later … later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe