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“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you,--you'd forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“I mean,’ he says, ‘that I don’t think you have any idea what it is like to be married to someone like you.’ ‘Like me?’ ‘Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself. Someone who can just look at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance. Someone who can tell what you are about to say – and what you might not – before you say it. It is,’ he says, ‘both a joy and a curse.’ She shrugs. ‘None of these things I can help. I never—”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“That’s what I dislike most of all in people—cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can’t experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others. Cold irony is Urizen’s basic weapon. The armaments of impotence. At the same time the ironists always have a world outlook that they proclaim triumphantly, though if one starts badgering and questioning them about the details, it turns out to consist of nothing but trivia and banalities.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead