Rita

“You remind me of everything that followed.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“I swore I wouldn't contact you again. But six weeks on, and I feel no better. Being without you-thousands of miles from you-offer is no relief at all. The fact that I am no longer tormented by your presence, or presented with daily evidence of my inability to have the one thing I truly desire, has not healed me. It has made things worse. My future feels like a bleak, empty road.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Last Letter from Your Lover

“You know... it's fine to be sad. Really. You're allowed to be sad about losing someone you love'... 'Losing someone you love is... it's actually unbearable. I do understand that.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Last Letter from Your Lover

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History