graceful

“Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“We are living now.
We shall not live long.
No one should tell us we shall live again.
This is our little while.
This is our chance.”
― Susan Glaspell

“He looked different in sleep, beautiful but cold as moonlight.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History